Dometic Go water jug and water faucet

The bags are packed, and the car is loaded for camping: tent, camp chairs, sleeping bags, cooler, and a whole lot more. But what’s the most important piece of gear in the back of the car? What’s the one thing you can’t afford to leave behind?

For Dometic product manager Owen Mesdag, the answer is simple—but it’s often overlooked.

Water: It’s the camp essential, whether you’re out for an overnight on the beach, a weekend in the woods, or a month in the mountains. And with the Water Jug and Water Faucet (part of the new Dometic GO collection), Mesdag and the Dometic team sought to create water storage and dispensing solutions worthy of water’s significance.

The 11-liter Dometic GO Water Jug overhauls a taken-for-granted piece of gear by packing in innovative features like a separate, large opening for easy cleaning, burly carry straps, and built-in tiedown guides—to name just a few. And the rechargeable Water Faucet, the first of its kind for camping applications, brings running water to camp in a portable, easy-to-use design that can pump 150 liters of water on a single charge.

On the tail of the Water Jug and Faucet’s release, Dometic chatted with Mesdag about innovative design, age-old camping problems, and the two products finally giving water the attention it deserves among the rest of the stuff in your gear closet.

From jerrycans to grocery store plastic jugs, there’s already a lot of water storage products out there—so why go to the trouble of building a new one?

OM: I always tell people that water storage is one of the most unaddressed categories in camping and overlanding. You go to any camping store that sells water storage containers, and they're basically just blue gas cans. They’re specifically designed to store water, but that's it—once you want to get the water back out, there's nothing there for you. With the Water Jug, we wanted to design a water storage product that was focused on the end-user: the person who would actually interact with it.

 

Let’s talk some of those user-focused features—how did the design come together?

OM: It essentially designed itself: The things on our checklist just kept showing up in the sketches. It needed to be easy to lift (it's exactly half of a traditional jerrycan, so it’s manageable, and it’s a balanced load if you’re walking with two of them), and it needed to be easy to pour, so there’s a spigot. Something everybody's always hated about water containers is that you can't clean them, so the Jug has an opening that you can reach inside with a brush. It also needed to be able to work with products already out there, so it’s got a Nalgene opening as well as a quick-connect CPC fitting. So, we just kept adding these things to the prototype—which at first was just a cardboard box with marks on it—actually, I still have that prototype.

 

So there's the Water Jug, but there’s also the Water Faucet, which solves the oldest camping problem in the book: no running water at camp.

OM: When you walk around your house, you flip on the lights and you have light. You open the fridge and you've got cold food. You turn on the sink, you have water. Well, if you think about camping these days, you have electric power, with batteries and solar. You have a fridge with powered coolers. But since the day of the caveman, running water has been missing while outdoor camping. And that’s a huge pain: You have to pour water out to wash your hands, or fill your water bottle, or make spaghetti. But with the Water Faucet, you can just give it a double tap, and water’s coming out. I put the faucet magnet on my fridge slide, and now I can pull my fridge out, attach the faucet, and I have running water right at the back of the car. It’s a game-changer.

 

And you can just stick the faucet anywhere, right?

It has a magnetic base, so you can stick it to things that are magnetic. Great. But what if people want to stick it to something that's not magnetic? Well, good point. So we came up with a thin metal puck, and with the puck’s double-sided tape you have a place to stick your faucet wherever you want it. So, if you have a camp kitchen—a camp table, or a picnic table—you can add this and now your kitchen has a faucet. Now you just turn on the water. It brings RV comfort into regular camping.

 

The Faucet has a flow rate of 1 liter/minute and an auto shut-off after one minute. What’s the logic behind those numbers?

OM: The auto shut-off and flow rate are specifically designed to conserve water. If I’m washing my hands, for example, I don’t need it blasting. And the auto shut-off is so that you don’t accidentally have it on when you don’t need it on. I can put my teapot under the faucet, turn it on, and then walk away—and know that it’ll shut off after it dispenses a liter of water.

 

Can you use the Water Faucet with water storage containers besides the Dometic Water Jug? How can the Faucet fit into people’s existing setups?

OM: The Water Jug and Water Faucet work really well together, but both are great products by themselves. The faucet is self-pumping and self-priming, so you can just stick its hose right into whatever you may already have—a traditional jerrycan, a five-gallon bucket, or even a goldfish pond—and it’ll suck water right through it. Or you can click it into anything with a quick-connect CPC fitting, like a lot of water storage products from brands like HydraPak, Osprey, and Camelbak.

The other thing is that the faucet’s hose is a ¼" ID silicone hose, so if someone wants to do a van build or, say, put their water container some distance from their faucet, they could just go buy more hose at the hardware store, or on Amazon. All the features are there, for however you prefer to do your water.

 

What if I’m off-grid and need to treat my water? Is the Water Jug compatible with water filtration systems?

OM: The Water Jug has a 63-millimeter opening—the same as your standard Nalgene bottle—so you can use any water filter designed to connect with that opening. Nalgene openings were king for a long time, but as time went on and gravity filter systems became more prevalent, quick-connect CPC fittings became more common. The Jug has a built-in CPC fitting too, so it'll work with any water filter with a CPC fitting.

 

You’ve worked on outdoor water products for a long time. How do the Water Jug and Water Faucet fit into the larger picture?

OM: Think about the gear you pack whenever you load the car to go camping. People want to talk about their new jackets, or their new tent, or whatever other piece of gear. Traditionally, water is not a cool product category. So it never gets thought of, and the most important piece of gear in your car is an afterthought. The goal is to change that: Water is important—so let’s make products that are worth that importance.

 

The Water Jug and Faucet are part of the Dometic GO collection: innovative, built-to-last gear that makes it easier than ever to go camping, hiking, biking, or whatever gets you outside—all designed to fit in the trunk of your car. Explore GO today.