How We Sanitize Our RV Fresh Water Tank Without Bleach

For years, sanitizing our water system meant bleach. A cup and a quarter in a bucket, siphoned in through the hose, then a whole evening of waiting. This spring we stopped. If you want to sanitize your RV fresh water tank without bleach, here is the way we do it now, three months in, with the numbers and the mistakes included.

Blu Technology sent us the AR3 filtration system and BLEACHFREE at no cost, and this post contains affiliate links. If you buy through our link we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The process below, and what we think of it, are ours.

Bleach works. That was never the problem.

Let me say this plainly, because the internet gets weird about it: there is nothing wrong with bleach. It sanitizes. It is cheap. If you have been using bleach for twenty years and you are happy, keep using bleach. We did it that way for a long time and never got sick.

What finally wore us out was everything around it. Bleach is caustic, and the thing it is caustic to is your plumbing. Every time you run it through, you are running an oxidizer past your PEX lines, your fittings, and the seals in your water heater. One time is nothing. Twice a year for the life of the rig starts to add up.

Then there is the clock. Fill the system, run every faucet until it stinks of chlorine, and let it sit six to eight hours. Realistically that means overnight, which means the job eats two days instead of one. And after all that, you dump, you flush, and half the time you still taste it for a week.

What BLEACHFREE actually is

This is the part I wanted to understand before I put anything in a tank we drink out of.

BLEACHFREE is a liquid concentrate that does the sanitizing job with no chlorine, no oxidizers, and no acids. Blu Technology rates it at killing 99.99% of harmful bacteria. It is NSF certified and EPA registered — EPA Reg. No. 16318-105-7020, which you can look up yourself rather than taking my word or theirs.

The part that matters for an RV: because there is no oxidizer in it, it is rated safe for PEX plumbing, metal fittings, filtration systems, water softeners, reverse osmosis units, and your water heater. The manufacturer specifically calls out protection against corrosion and PEX degradation. That is the whole argument for switching, and it is a plumbing argument, not a cleaning one. Both products sanitize. Only one of them is gentle on the system you are sanitizing.

The other practical difference is the clock. Contact time is 15 minutes, not overnight.

What it costs, and how much you need

Dosing is simple. One 0.5 oz packet treats up to 20 gallons. A pack holds two packets, so one pack covers 40 gallons.

Our fresh tank is rated right around 100 gallons and holds somewhere near 80 to 90 full. So:

• Fresh water tank: four packets — two packs
• Fresh water line, done separately: two packets — one pack
• Our total for the job: six packets — three packs

Here is the honest part. BLEACHFREE runs about $20 a pack depending on where you buy it, so a full sanitize on a system our size lands somewhere around sixty bucks. A jug of bleach is four. If cost per sanitize is the only number you care about, bleach wins and it is not close.

We think the trade is worth it for what it saves in plumbing wear and in an evening we do not have to give up. You might not, and that is a fair call to make. Check your own tank capacity before you buy — dose for your rig, not ours.

How we sanitize our RV fresh water tank without bleach

We run it through the Tasty housing on our AR3 filter system, which is just a convenient place to dump the concentrate. You do not need that setup — more on that below.

• Kill the water and bleed the pressure. We have a quick release shutoff on the inlet. Close it, bleed the system down, and the pressure comes off so the housing does not fight you.
• Open the Tasty housing and pull the filter. On the AR3 the Tasty is the third stage, last in line before water reaches the camper. Blu includes a wrench for the housing. Set the filter aside somewhere clean — it goes back in at the end.
• Pour in the packets. Four for a tank our size. We put in enough for about 40 gallons, watched it go, then added the rest.
• Reassemble, and mind the gasket. There is a gasket in the housing that likes to come along for the ride when you unscrew it. Check that it seated before you tighten anything.
• Water back on, look for leaks. Ten seconds now beats a wet bay later.
• Nautilus to power fill, meter to zero. On our panel that is down, over, up, down. Go by your own panel, not ours.
• Fill until it overflows. That is your full mark.
• Wait 15 minutes. Not overnight. Fifteen.
• Push it through the plumbing. Pump on, every faucet open, hot and cold both so the water heater gets treated too. You will see foam come up in the sinks, and that is your visual that the solution reached that fixture.
• Drain the tank and refill with fresh water.
• Do the fresh water line on its own. Water off, pressure relieved, canister out, two packets in. Reassemble, switch the Nautilus to city water, pump off, water back on, check for leaks. Ours is white down, green left, red up, blue over.
• Run it until the foam quits. When the foam stops, you are into clean water. Filter goes back in and you are done.

The gasket that will soak you

Worth its own heading because it is the one thing here that can actually ruin your afternoon.

The Tasty charcoal filter is the only cartridge in the AR3 that has to go back in a specific direction. One end has a gasket, the other does not, and the gasket end goes up. Put it in upside down and the first time you pressurize the system it will spray water all over you. Ask me how the thought occurred to me.

No filtration system? Run it through the hose.

None of this is specific to Blu Tech equipment, and I want to be clear about that because it would be easy to read this as an ad for a filter housing.

If you do not have a canister to pour into, disconnect your fresh water hose at the spigot, funnel the concentrate straight into the hose, hook it back up, and turn the water on. It pushes into the rig the same way and it sanitizes the hose on the way through, which the canister method does not. The only rule is that there cannot be a filter inline while you do it — pull the filter first, or you are just sanitizing your filter.

How long it actually takes

About an hour, run in 15-minute cycles. Fifteen for the tank to soak. Fifteen to push it through the lines. Fifteen on the fresh water line by itself. Add the time it takes to fill and drain 100 gallons and you are looking at roughly an hour from start to finish.

Against six to eight hours and an overnight sit, that is the entire reason we switched. And since there is no chlorine in it, there is no chlorine smell to chase out of the lines for the next week.

What it will not do

It sanitizes. It does not descale. If your water tastes off because of mineral buildup in the lines, no sanitizer is going to fix that — that is a vinegar job, and it is a different afternoon. Sanitizing kills what is living in there; it does not strip what has deposited.

You also still have to flush afterward. This is not a pour-it-in-and-forget-it product, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something.

Would we go back to bleach?

No. Not because bleach failed us — it never did — but because we would rather spend an hour than an evening, and we would rather not run an oxidizer through a plumbing system we plan to keep for another decade.

Blu Technology recommends running it every three to four months, or whenever you change filters. We did ours in May and again at the end of August, which lines up. It is now part of the seasonal routine instead of a whole weekend project we keep putting off.

Watch the whole process

The video is the part that is hard to write down — the housing coming apart, the foam coming up in the sink, the gasket orientation, and what the water looks like when it is finally clean. It is all in there, including the outtake where Debi had to remind me to shut the water off first.

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Save 7% on BLEACHFREE and Blu Technology systems through our link — affiliate, and we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you: goblutech.com/RollingwithTheCurves

If you want to see the filter system this runs through, the AR3 install and taste test is here: watch the AR3 install.

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