Camco 20166 RV Water Hose & Power Cord Storage Basket

If you've ever fought a tangled shore power cord in the bottom of a lazarette, or coiled a 50-foot water hose only to have it spring loose the second you turned around, you already know why this basket exists. The Camco 20166 gives your cords and hoses a home. It's a simple, round storage basket built to hold up to 75 feet of fresh water hose or electrical cord, and it does one job well.

Here's how it works. You wind the hose or cord around the outside of the basket, the same way you'd wrap a garden hose on a reel, except there's no crank and no moving parts to seize up. Hooks on the underside let you catch the end and uncoil exactly the length you need without dragging the whole coil out. Need ten feet at the pedestal? Pull ten feet. The rest stays put.

The center compartment is the part boaters and RVers tend to appreciate most. It's sized to hold a water pressure regulator, a 10-inch RV water filter canister, and the odd accessories that always go missing, splitters, elbows, spare washers. Everything for your fresh water hookup rides in one place, so you're not opening three different storage bays looking for the filter.

It's molded from heavy-duty, UV-stabilized plastic, which matters more than it sounds. Cord and hose storage lives outside, in the sun, in the salt air, season after season. Cheap plastic goes chalky and brittle and cracks the first cold morning you drop it. UV stabilization is what keeps this one flexible and holding its shape year after year. The color is blue, and the whole thing measures 18-1/2 inches wide by 8-1/2 inches tall, so it stows flat in a dock box, a cockpit locker, or an RV storage bay without eating your whole compartment.

One thing worth knowing before you order. The basket sits on its base, it doesn't mount to a wall, so plan on a flat spot in a storage bay, dock box, or the corner of a garage where it can stand. Because it's round and open-topped, you can drop the whole thing in and out of a compartment in one motion, no unclipping, no unthreading. When you break camp or leave the slip, coil the cord back on, tuck the regulator in the middle, and the whole hookup travels as one tidy unit.

Who's this for? Anyone who keeps a boat at a slip or a marina and runs shore power and dockside water. Anyone with an RV who's tired of a rat's nest of cord in the pass-through. It's just as happy holding a drinking-water-safe hose as it is holding a 30-amp or 50-amp shore cord. Because the coil sits in the open air, it dries out between uses instead of sitting wet and coiled in a bag, which is how hoses grow that funky taste.

Give it a rinse now and then to keep salt and grit from building up, and it'll look sharp for years. There's really nothing to maintain, no bearings, no springs, no reel to jam.

A couple of honest notes. This is a basket, not a powered reel, so there's no retracting mechanism, you coil it by hand. And the pressure regulator, filter, and any hose or cord you see in listing photos aren't included, they're just what the center compartment and basket are built to hold. What you're buying is the storage basket itself.

For the money, it's one of those small pieces of gear that quietly makes dock days and setup easier. Coil it, hook it, grab what you need, and stop tripping over loose cord. That's the whole idea.