4 Fantastic Outdoor RV Shower Ideas

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In our opinion, an outdoor RV shower is a must-have when you’re living the RV life, especially if you happen to have kids or pets. The outdoor RV shower is an incredibly useful tool, and with a few minor tweaks you can make it an even more handy thing to have around. 

In this article we will take a look at the amazing uses for RV outdoor showers and discuss how you can make your outdoor RV shower even better.

Great Uses for an RV Outdoor Shower

Wondering what’s so great about an outdoor shower for RV motorhomes and trailers? Honestly, the RV outdoor shower has a variety of great uses, and many RVing families will tell you that they couldn’t live without it. 

Below are some of the best benefits of owning an outdoor RV shower. 

Rinsing Off Before Going Inside

The most common and most obvious use for RV outdoor showers is simply to rinse off before going inside the RV. It’s no secret that spending time outdoors is messy business. Whether you’ve spent the day hiking a muddy trail or building sandcastles on the beach, having a way to rinse the sand, dust, and dirt from your body before you enter your home is always nice. 

Showering Pets

If you travel with a dog, you know how quickly a stinky dog can cause your tiny home-on-wheels to stink. Besides, just like children, dogs have a tendency to get messy when playing outside. All of these things mean you really need a way to clean your pup off in between visits to the groomer. This is where your RV outdoor shower can come into play. 

An outdoor RV shower is the perfect option for washing your dog off without squeezing them into a tiny RV tub or getting your floors soaking wet. 

Saving Gray Tank Space While Boondocking

If you enjoy boondocking and want to find ways to extend your time out in nature, your RV outdoor shower might be the key. You see, the thing that limits most RVers when it comes to how long they can boondock is water. 

It’s easy enough to go into town and fill up some jugs with fresh water to pour into your tank, but when your gray tank is full, emptying it is a bigger ordeal, especially if you don’t have a large wastewater bladder and/or pump. 

By using your outdoor RV shower to wash off, you avoid filling your gray tank with shower water, and thus extend the amount of time you are able to spend in one boondocking spot before dumping is necessary. 

Showering when the Bathroom is In Use

Finally, we love the outdoor shower for bigger families sharing a single RV bathroom. Sure, you can head to the bathhouse when parked in a campground, but if you’re dry camping and need to get multiple people clean in a short amount of time, RV outdoor showers can feel like a miracle.

Improving Your Outdoor RV Shower

RV outdoor showers are great straight from the factory. That said, there’s always room for improvement, and in the case of the outdoor RV shower, making those improvements is really quite simple. Not only that, but making even the simplest of changes can drastically improve your outdoor showering experience.

Below are some of our favorite ways to improve upon an outdoor shower to make it even more useful. 

Changing the Shower Head

We’ve mentioned changing out the stock RV shower head on your indoor shower before. This improvement works just as well on an outdoor RV shower. 

Choosing a shower head that reduces water usage while improving the water pressure is especially nice for improving the shower experience and reducing water usage. Oxygenics products are great for this (just make sure it’s small enough to fit in the outdoor shower box on the RV). 

Hanging a Shower Curtain

Nobody wants to shower out in the open, barring a certain subset of travelers out there (you know who you are). Honestly, even if you wear a bathing suit and park in the middle of nowhere, showering outside can still feel a little bit odd. Adding some sort of outdoor RV shower enclosure is the solution to this problem. 

The easiest way to go about this? Hang a shower curtain using a U-shaped curtain rod for privacy while you get cleaned up. 

There are only a couple of issues with this option. For one, the curtain will stick to you if it is blown your way during your shower. Secondly, these curtain rods don’t always stay in place with the suction cups provided, meaning a creative temporary mounting solution might need to be employed. 

Using A Shower Tent

If the curtain and curtain rod don’t provide the level of privacy you were hoping for, you can use a shower tent as an outdoor RV shower enclosure instead.

A shower tent is a bit more sturdy than a curtain and won’t stick to you as you’re trying to shower. They fold down small for easy storage and pop up quickly and easily when it’s time to set up camp.

The major downfall of the shower tent is its tendency to blow away in heavy winds, so you will want to find a way to anchor it down. 

Adding a Raised Floor

We’ve addressed issues with water pressure and usage, as well as privacy problems. Another problem many people have with using RV outdoor showers? Standing in the mud puddle created on the ground as they shower. This can be solved with the addition of a raised bamboo shower mat. 

Putting down a raised platform such as the one linked above gets your feet up out of the mud, so you can end your shower with clean feet. (Just make sure you have a clean path from the shower to the door of your home.)

Clearly, RV outdoor showers are wonderfully useful, and making major improvements to an outdoor RV shower is surprisingly easy. Why not start making improvements now and put your RV outdoor shower to use as soon as possible?

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