A motorhome is a small water company with a diesel habit. You carry your own mains, your own drains and your own sewage works, and the trip moves to their timetable. A 100-litre fresh tank and a 17-litre cassette decide when you leave a place far more often than the weather does.
Why the UK makes you work for water
France has thousands of aires with service bornes, many of them next to the village boulangerie. The UK has no equivalent network, which is exactly why CAMpRA, the Campaign for Real Aires, exists. Dedicated motorhome service points here are scarce and scattered: a few council-run facilities, some pubs and marinas that have installed a point, the odd farm shop that gets it. CAMpRA's map and the usual stopover apps will find them, but plan fills the way you'd plan fuel in the Highlands. Assume the next tap is further away than you'd like.
Campsites will say yes more often than you'd think
The most reliable UK source is a campsite you're not staying at. Pull in mid-morning after the checkouts, ask at reception, and offer to pay. Plenty of sites will let you fill fresh, dump grey and empty the cassette for a few quid, especially outside school holidays. Some list a formal service charge on their website. The etiquette is simple: ask first, pay what they ask, buy something from the shop if there is one, and leave the point cleaner than you found it. The van behind you is trading on your behaviour.
Europe does this properly
Cross the Channel and the problem largely evaporates. French aires come with a borne (often a Flot Bleu column) that dispenses fresh water and sometimes electricity for a small payment. As of 2026 the going rate is a few euros for roughly 100 litres or ten minutes of water, paid by card, coin or jeton. Jetons are tokens sold locally, typically €2–3 from the mairie, the tabac or a nearby shop. Grey and cassette emptying at these points is nearly always free, and some bornes, the Fontaine type among them, charge nothing at all. Supermarkets and fuel stations across France frequently have a service point round the back. It's ordinary infrastructure there, not a treasure hunt.
Grey and black: where each can legally go
Grey water feels harmless. Legally it isn't. DEFRA's position is that grey water should not go down highway drains, because many roadside storm drains discharge straight to a watercourse, not a sewer. In England and Wales, the Environmental Permitting Regulations 2016 mean any discharge to the ground or a watercourse needs a permit or an exemption, and a sink tank full of detergent and food fat has neither. Scotland is the same in practice: SEPA publishes guidance on campervan wastewater, and a hire firm has already collected a fixed penalty after one of its vans emptied into a Highland drain. The correct destination is a drain connected to the foul sewer: a campsite grey disposal point or a motorhome service point. Having said that, many small campsites, especially temporary holiday sites (even within the big clubs), encourage people to empty grey waste into the bottom of their hedges, away from any nearby watercourses. So use your discretion, and behave discreetly and responsibly.
Black waste is stricter still and simpler to remember. The cassette goes down a chemical disposal point (the Elsan point on a campsite, or the marked hatch on a service borne), and nowhere else. CDPs connect to the foul sewer and are built for the job. Rinse the cassette at the CDP's dedicated tap, never at the drinking water tap, and keep a separate hose end for it if you carry one.
What goes in the cassette
Toilet fluid comes in two camps. Blue fluids are the traditional sanitisers: effective, but they work by killing bacteria, which is precisely what a septic tank relies on. Green fluids work biologically instead, breaking waste down rather than sterilising it, and they're the only type many rural and farm sites will accept because those sites drain to a septic system. Formaldehyde, the old villain of blue fluids, has largely been phased out of UK products as of 2026, but "formaldehyde-free" still doesn't mean septic-safe. If in doubt, run green everywhere and you'll never be turned away from a disposal point. Dose per the bottle, keep a little water in the bowl for the seal, and empty every couple of days rather than waiting for the level indicator to insist.
Winter changes the arithmetic
Between November and March a good share of UK taps and service points are shut off or lagged against frost, so the scarce network gets scarcer. Carry more capacity than you think you need. A couple of rigid 10-litre containers cost little and fit in the garage, and the hose reel, filler and collapsible waste pipes that deal with awkward taps and distant drains are on the outdoors gear page. Grey tanks freeze before fresh ones because they sit exposed under the floor, so in a hard frost empty the grey before bed or leave the valve open over a bucket. And drain everything properly when the van's laid up. A cracked pump in March is a winter souvenir nobody wants.
A wet Tuesday near Builth Wells, fresh tank showing a quarter. The campsite on the A470 wasn't taking tourers that week, but reception took £4 for a fill and a cassette empty, done in fifteen minutes. Logged as a Service stop with the levels before and after. That's the record that later showed the van uses 23 litres a day with two aboard.
The habit that makes all of this manageable is measurement. Once you know your litres per day and days per cassette, you can plan fills like fuel stops. Stops & Stays does that by recording fresh and waste levels at every stop, on arrival and again on departure, so the rate falls out of the data rather than out of your memory.
If the van is where you live rather than where you holiday, the same readings answer a bigger question: what water, gas and site fees add up to across a month. And since the power budget runs on the same discipline, off-grid power for ordinary vans is the companion to this one.
Reading this on a laptop?
Stops & Stays is a phone app. Point your phone's camera at the code and it'll take you to the store, or search Stops & Stays in the App Store or on Google Play.
Know your litres per day, not your guess
Log Service stops and arrival/departure tank levels in Stops & Stays and your real consumption rate falls out of the data. Ten stops free. No ties.
