Watch the Portable RV Water Softener YouTube Video Below!

Hi everybody. This is Craig the water guy. Thank you for visiting us today!

I want to go over the best portable RV water softener with you. I have an RV myself that we own. We like to take off on vacations and do a little traveling on the go. The issue we run across on a regular basis is how bad the water is in different areas. It dries your skin out and it's not good for the RV either.

So I put together a filtration system for my RV. I'm pretty happy with the way it works so I wanted to go over that with you real quick. 

So the first thing that I did is... 

I got tired of replacing those carbon filters all the time, on a regular basis. Some RVs have the housing already built into their RV. They put the carbon filter in there and replace it as needed. Other folks don't have that and they've purchase housing and have their own setup. And I still recommend that you use a carbon filter but instead of having to have that carbon filter plugged up on a regular basis it costs you a fortune and replaces the filters.

What I've done is I use an inline "T" separator here.

So this one shows a 1" what it is but I actually use 3/4" which we're going to put on our website for you so you can see those. What we do is these are threaded internally.

So you just screw your female and your male hose adapters into these and you bring your hose into the inlet side of it out. And then from there, you're gonna to run it through your water softener which I'll show you in a second.

The nice thing about these inline T profile the temperatures are going to remove the sediment out of the water.

They're cleanable filters. So this ball valve that comes with it, is you attach it to the bottom of the filter here. So once in a while, you just open up blow the sediment out with the filter it looks like you starts to get dirty.

You just shut the water off the hose. Open this valve and drain the pressure off. Unscrew this bowl. Pull the filter out and use a soft brush with water and go ahead clean it off and put it back in.

Portable RV Water Softener Filters

I've been using the same filter now for about 3 years and it is still good. So you can imagine the amount of money it saved without having to replace the filters on a regular basis on the carbon filter when I do that.

OK. So this is a big deal here. It's $79 to buy the whole setup that comes with the filter and the ball valve. You're ready to go!

It's a great deal. The nice thing about this too is that it doesn't restrict your flow. It's a high-flow water filter. So from there what I do is I run through the water softener.

Sizing the Portable Water Softener for Your RVs

There are different sized water softener for RVs out there. We've broken it down to different sizes for you. An 8,000-grain capacity is good for a single person parttime. Meaning that they don't live in their RV.

They just use it every once in a while with just one single person. You might be able to get away with two people if you like. You just gotta go out and have to add salt and recharge it more often is all.

I don't know about you but when I'm RVing I prefer to have fun, rather than worrying about maintenance stuff on a regular basis. But if you're the type of person that decides to do stuff like that when you get away with this.

The next portable water softener is good for two people. The two people are more expensive obviously but you'd go longer before you need to regenerate the system. Which I'll go over the regeneration process with you here in a minute.

The 21,000-grain capacity, which is a pretty good size. I mean your average home water softener is 32,000-grain capacity and some people even get 24,000 grain. So 21,000 grain is a pretty good size.

It's great for one or two people, even three people full-time or part-time if you don't want to maintain it as often.

For someone that lives in their RV and travels full-time with it. This is a really nice option to have.

Maintaining Your Portable RV Water Softener & Filter

So as far as maintenance goes, on these, you have a nice handle on them. They come with the connections, the host connections. The male and female connectors. If the bail and the female connectors. They have a nice handle on here so you could grab the handle. Move it around.

Up here is a plug. So what you're gonna do is, shut the water up to the hose that, if you go with this option here It will shut the water off here and open that valve with the greater pressure.

Then on the opposite side of this water softener, you're going to go ahead and turn the faucet on just to drain some pressure off the faucet on the outlet side the portable water softener.

Then what you're going to do is you're going to take this...See this plug right here, this gray plug. You're going to unscrew that. Unscrew that, then you just tip the water softener to the side and dump some water out of there so the water gets down to about a quarter of the way down. Leave some room for the salt.

What Salt Do I Need for My Portable Water Softener?

Just pick up standard table salt. Depending on the size of the system will depend on how much salt you'll use. For the 8,000-grain capacity system, you're going to use what small container Leslie salt. What I've done is at Costco I picked up a twenty-pound bag of table salt.

I just use a cup and I dump it in there. Then go ahead and screw this right back on. Turn the water back on and turn it on slowly and let the water run slowly through the drain. Just at a trickle. Just keep on checking the water until it's not salty anymore.

Taste it. When it's not salty anymore turn your hose up all the way and let it run out for about a minute or maybe two minutes tops. Then turned it off and you're ready to go!

When you go the 16,000-grain capacity you going to double up your dosage so you're going to use two small boxes of the Leslie table salt or two cups. It's the same process.

With the 21,000-grain system, you're going to use three boxes or three cups. Then you're ready to go! Of course again, the larger the RV water softener system, the longer you can you go before you need to do that process. So that's how that works.

Water Softener for Your RV with RO Systems

Then what I've done with mine is I'll also run it through a reverse osmosis system. So my reverse osmosis system has a carbon filter already in it. It already has two carbon filters and a sediment filter as well and it has the high-efficiency membrane with an alkalizer filter is what I use.

So what I do here is after my water softener is inside my cabinet inside my pass through on my RV is I go from the water softener directly into here. The nice thing about this particular RO over other ones I've used over the years is this one is a high-efficiency RO so it only wastes one gallon of water for every gallon it makes. Your typical RO wastes anywhere 3 to 4 gallons for every gallon that it makes. This is a big deal especially for RVs because you're draining the water to the ground usually so you're always looking for a place to put it where it's not going to a flooded area it could be it yourself or the people around you.

So this is a one-to-one which is nice. You shouldn't have any complaints about that. The way this system works here is the water in the softener runs through the sediment filter first. Goes through both the carbon filters, goes through the membrane, which should produce up to 75 gallons per day.

Then coming out of the membrane to your little storage tank that it comes with, It goes through your carbon block filter for polishing or you use what I use, which is the alkalizer which will raise the pH up to about 8 to 8.5 for you which is really nice to have because RO water is acidic so if you don't raise the pH balance up and you put RO water to your hot water heater, which is metal, It will corrode those. So it's really nice to raise that pH up.

What I do is I run into my water tank and I use my water pump to feed the whole RV with RO water. So we have really nice soft water throughout the RV as well as purified water from the reverse osmosis system.

If you don't want to do it that way, then you could just run a line from there, up to your kitchen sink, and put a spigot there. It comes with a nice chrome spigot and you can do it that way or you could just install it underneath you sink in your RV if that's what you want to do.

But for me what I do again is that I run it into my fresh water storage tank and I pump it out from there. So that's how that system works. If you want to add the alkalizer to it, you can add it to the cart. It brings up the price a little bit but that will definitely give you the best of the best all the way around. I hope that helps you, folks, out today.

Have a question about this portable water softener system for RVs? Give us a call. 1-866-278-4130 and one of us will be able to help out.

Have a great day!