 Recently, I stayed at an RV park where the water was kind of funky, so I tested it, and the results were disgusting. Happy Sunday birdwatchers! It's Robin with Creativity RV. I hope you're all doing well out there. I am doing great, but today, unfortunately, I have to tell you about some funky RV water that I discovered. When you go to an RV park, you think that you can depend on the city water hookup that goes into your rig, and you can know that that water is safe. Well, I learned a lot about where water comes from and how it's regulated, and what you can expect when you're at a park that I did not know, even after six years on the road. So today, I'm going to tell you about it. Now you guys know I'm normally a boondocker, but this last fall and early spring, I had to spend quite a bit of time in a park because I was preparing for some surgery. So doctor's appointments before and then the surgery and then recovery I spent at Mountaindale RV Resort in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Over the course of about six months, I think I was there about three and a half months in total. And I was familiar with this place because it's the same place I've gone every year during the holidays to be near my family. So you know, it's your typical family run RV park with its pros and its cons. But you know, overall, good park with nice people. So I was shocked by what I discovered while I was there. Now I waited months to do this video while I did a lot of research and talked to experts and interviewed other RV park owners. I'm not trying to scare anybody or hurt anybody's business. But this is definitely information that you're going to want to know. So while I was at Mountaindale, there was an intermittent, gaseous, disgusting smell coming out of my faucet in the kitchen when I ran the water. And it wasn't all the time. It would just like hitch in the face and then it would be gone. And other people came over and they could smell it and I thought it was just me. I thought maybe I had a problem with my pipes or my hot water heater needed to be cleaned. I moved spots. It was there again. And then I could smell something outside that was concerning. And then the park started doing a lot of excavation. Our water was cut off all the time. And you can see here that they were just tearing up the entire park, redoing the pipes and they didn't know where the pipes were. And the whole thing seemed a little bit confusing. And we kept getting these messages from the park owner saying, the water is going to be shut off. But once we're done, you're going to have the cleanest water in Colorado. And I thought, OK, well, that's nice. But one morning I was in their lobby and I saw this old yellow piece of paper kind of hidden away in a corner. And I went over and looked at it. And it was a public notice of water violations from 2020. So I went home and I got online with the state authority in Colorado and looked up what was going on with the water there. And the results were really shocking. I'm going to actually show you guys what the results were online. And then I'll tell you what my test said when I tested the water myself. You can see here that over the course of 10 years, they had dozens of violations in the quality of their water. Now, most of them were failure to monitor or failure to report or failure to notify the public. But there were also missing standards like missing filters, failure to disinfect. And there were also issues with lead, copper, chlorine, and more. And that was really concerning to me. So I went to Amazon and I got some water tests. You can see here I got two different tests that tested for like 19 different things and two tests that included bacteria and E. coli. You guys, the results were not good. I wanted the test that I did to be as accurate as possible. So I tested the water from three different sources, from my kitchen sink, from the faucet in the RV park bath house, and also directly from a spigot at an empty spot next to mine. And then I ran the three different sources of water through all of these 19 panels and bacteria and E. coli. Overall, the water was pretty good except in three categories. First of all, the pH was totally off. Second of all, and more troubling is that my test revealed that the RV park had sulfur levels that were off the charts, like the worst that I could see on the test from all three sources. And I think that's why the water smelled intermittently. And I learned that sulfur is not regulated, but high levels of sulfur can actually be dangerous to some people, including infants and the elderly and people that have to have a low sodium diet because it's actually a laxative. So it will give you diarrhea. And, you know, this is an RV park where about half the people that are there live there. And there are some older people, as you can imagine, and people with kids. And so that was troubling to me. And then I kept thinking, God, there's got to be people in here that are on a low sodium diet and they're changing everything that they eat and drink and their results are still bad and they don't know why. And it's probably because of the water, even worse than that. I had two tests for bacteria and E. coli. And in my kitchen sink, it was fine. Thank God. But in the bathroom of the campground, there was a little bit of bacteria detected, but then disgusting. The empty RV spot where I got the water directly from the spigot definitely had E. coli and bacteria. And you can see the test here. Now, I think that this is because people are disconnecting to leave the campground and they're rinsing their black hose right from the spigot. And, you know, fecal matter is touching the spigot. And then somebody else comes and hooks up and that water is going right into their rig. Now you guys know that when you go to an RV park and you hook up, there's two ways that you can fill your water. There is the city water connection and the fresh tank fill. Well, I thought that if it said city water, it must be safe because it must be coming from the city and it must be regulated, right? Not necessarily so. I found out that your water in an RV park or a campground can come from four different sources. It can come from the city, but that's only if your RV park is close enough to the city lines. And a lot of these campgrounds and RV parks are in rural areas. So in that case, the water might also come from a rural pump where the county will pump the water from the city closer to the county. And if that's the case, then they have safety protocol and they have redundancies. So there's not a problem. But what I was surprised to find is that most of the RV parks or campgrounds that I've stayed at get their water from two other sources. One is a well and the other is to have their water trucked in. I found out that the last three parks that I've stayed at all did this in one way or another. Here's the problem. The requirements for what these parks have to do to keep your water safe varies by state. So in Colorado where I was, my understanding is that they were required to test the water themselves and treat the water themselves. And then if there was a violation, they were supposed to report it, which a lot of the violations of this park was that they didn't report it or they didn't notify the public if there was a problem. The fourth way that they get water is to have it trucked in. Water vendors will come in with these giant trucks and fill up the RV parks holding tanks and then it's pumped to your site. Well, at Mountaindale RV Resort where I was staying, my understanding as one of their patrons was that they had a well, but that it wasn't producing a lot. So they also trucked in water. The thing is they weren't trucking the water in from a vendor that was responsible for the water. They were going out with their own trucks and bringing back the water and I don't know what the source was, but then they took it to their own little treatment shed in the back of the park. It were responsible for monitoring it and treating it if it needed to be treated and then dispensing it out to people. And based on the results that I've had online and the tests that I did, they were not doing a bang up job, but I don't think they're alone. So if you're going to be staying at an RV park or a campground long-term and you're concerned about it, you can look up the results of their previous tests with the state or county online and you can also get these water tests. But above that, I would recommend getting a Berkey. I have a Berkey in my fifth wheel and I have a knockoff in this rig and it filters out the water so that it's much safer to drink. I did the same test with my Berkey water and they were much better. Again, I'll put the links for those down below. And the last thing is be careful about how you're storing your hoses. For example, coil up your water hose and secure it on the ends so that mice and things like that are not running through your water hose while they're in your storage bin because then you might be bringing contaminants into your rig through your own hose. The other thing is please don't put your black hose up to the spigot where other people are gonna be drinking out of the water. I'm usually careful about that, but I've seen lots of people who put it right up and touch their black hose to the spigot. So now I actually have a disinfectant spray that I put on the spigot before I attach my hose. And that might seem like overkill, but people, once I saw these results, I was pretty grossed out. And water can really affect your health. And as RVers, we're not in houses. We depend on these businesses or other water sources to give us clean, drinkable water. If you guys have any stories about bad water or anything else to add, please do put it in the comments below. I hope you have found this helpful. If you haven't subscribed already, please consider doing so. Give this video a thumbs up. Remember, I've got hundreds of other videos and you can follow me on Instagram, Facebook and on CreativityRV.com. I'll see you all next week with an all new video. Until then, everybody out there, have happy travels and be free.