A flat hose will have to be fully wound out every use & avoid any accidental folds when on the ground.

 

What about 2 shorter hoses. Say cut your hose at say the 2/5 3/5 point, or 1/3 2/3 for manageable lengths.

Been using a Flat Out water hose for 10 years full time on the road and still going well. Find if you lay it out straight to wind on reel it is better as it drains the water and if it is cold I run hand along it to flatten it a bit its easier. Dont like wind up for sullage as it is only gravity draining the water and if the hose hasnt expanded it restricts flow. So I just use black spiral stored in a bag. Just use loose power cord and when coiling lay it right out straight and coil as described previously ie. not around your arm. If you lay it out straight the loose end can spin as you coil and twists and kinks can come out of the cord. Always makes me scratch my head watching someone trying to wind a tangled mess onto their arm. As stated always fully unwind a power cord to use.

For sullage pipe & water hose, I have fixed 4 conduits, threaded through slots in the chassis under the van.  The far end has a cap fitted to each of the four pipes & a hinged cover (I think it is called a 'Plumdinger') to the other.  The water hoses are fitted with hose joiners & sealed with rubber feet and clip lock tap fittings.  The sullage pipes, when in use, are joined with short pieces of suitable sized conduit.  This arrangement lets me store two, about 7M STRAIGHT  lengths, of each.  I always run them through a rag to clean the outside of the hoses when I feed them into the storage pipes.  This way the pipes & hosed are always straight & not coiled.   An easy way to store them by just feeding into the conduits with no coils & always clean when pulling them out of storage.

For the power leads, as suggested by others I just coil them in LONG loops of about 1 to 2 M diameter loops and store them in old pillow case in the front boot, always uncoiling the whole lead when using it.

I keep a spare water hose & sullage pipe in the van's box chassis for the rare situations when the outlets are a long way from the van.

I have used this system for about 20 years.  

Dmaxer.

Have used one of their reels for my power leads, and it works well, but I always unwind totally.

I have used the sullage hose version, and wouldnt recommend it, as it is a rubber unit, and struggles to inflate, for want of a better term, when being used. It impeded the flow of sullage too much, and created issues. I got rid of it, and it is the reel from that used as my electricity cable reel.

I also used the water hose for 7 or 8 years, and it also worked very well. Eventually replaced when it got some pin prick leaks after plenty of outback camps, and I considered too expensive to replace. Would certainly recommend though as a hose, if kept clear of prickle areas. I have gone back to the hose bag wrestle in this case. This reel is my shorter cable winder.

Hope that assists you.

-- Edited by TheHeaths on Monday 19th of February 2024 11:12:57 AM

We had a Flat-out hose on a reel in our bus when we had it. Mainly as a space saver which it was. Ours was for filling our water tanks. To be honest I didnt like it much. It was expensive & a nuisance to use. I think it was 15 metres & we rarely needed that length to fill the tanks, and so the whole job always too longer than necessary. Unwind the whole thing, & then stuff around laying out the hose correcting any kinks before we could use it. Winding it up wasnt much better, the reel was awkward to use & never squeezed the water out of the hose, so time was required to walk the length of the hose squeezing it by hand as I went to empty out the water.

The whole process was such that if filling up where others wee awaiting access to the tap after me was one I didnt enjoy at all.

We didnt use it after that for a couple of years & the next time we unwound it, found that it had developed leaks in a number of places. Quite a relief really. Bought a roll of standard drinking water hose & made up a short & a medium length capable of being joined to make a longer length & have found them fine. We found a circular bag at one of those cheap shops to store them in which made life much easier.

Doesn't look like drinking water hose, bit rubbery Yobarr

Bobdown wrote:

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Doesn't look like drinking water hose, bit rubbery Yobarr

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 Just garden hose, Bob, but the water doesn't stay in the hose as I simply use the hose to fill tanks through a filter, disconnect hose, and then pump water out of one of the 6 tanks as required. 

There are two separate water pumps, one through a second filter for drinking water and the other for showers and general use.

Had plenty of the flash blue drinking water hose, but couldn't be bothered putting it onto the reel. Cheers

P.S The hose is only connected once a month for 30 minutes, to refill tanks.  Otherwise hose is empty, and also has two isolation taps on supply lines.

-- Edited by yobarr on Tuesday 20th of February 2024 06:52:48 AM

Not to forget if you want to dry out airlines (hoses), refrigerated cooling makes a big difference.

 

Moisture in air (7:1 due to the typical compressor psi adding water to your every tyre every time you inflate tyres. Remove moisture!), pumping up 1 tyre. No refrigerated cooling in this case, still my third line of defence for moisture removal. Actually forth as I had the car air conditioning running to supply air conditioned drier air, but I did have extensive internal & external heatsinks to condense moisture up stream on the moisture trap. Just goes to show how much water is ending up in tyres for the un-educated.

 

Heat sinks to get 140°C (estimated. As of 130°C externally) air to get hot air to outside (with silver based thermal paste under heatsinks).

 

The external heatsinks are fan cooled with high volume fans (2 of my 3 compressor set-up, not forget air tank).

 

Refrigerated cooling with fan forced cooling to condense moisture as quick as best as possible in a car setup system, very next to no room! If you have a caravan it will be a lot easier as you have a lot more room than in a car only set-up.

(Twin oil coolers with 2.4 metres of plumbing).

Just to add to the conversation I have moved my water connection from close to the front of the van to the rear (I have found that most CP's have water connection near the rear.

My twin water filters are mounted on the back of the van, removing the PRV and locating it on the in side of the filters and out side is JG pipe to the van, I have a couple of lengths of water hose plus one, all are stored in a hose bag.

As for power cords again I have 3 lengths 20, 10 and 5 meters, all are hand rolled with the male and female end connected and stored in shopping bags, easy to store that way. I do have a waterproof cover if I need to connect 2 power cord together.