Camco TastePure 40013 Inline RV Water Filter | KDF

The Camco TastePure inline water filter is the one you screw onto the fill hose before the water ever reaches your fresh tank. It's an in-line canister that pulls double duty: a high-flow carbon element knocks down chlorine taste and odor, and a bed of KDF media goes after dissolved metals and helps keep the inside of the filter from turning into a science project between fills. If you've ever filled up at a campground spigot and then tasted that pool-water tang coming out of your galley tap, this is the fix.

Here's how it fits into your setup. The inlet is a standard garden hose female coupling, so it threads right onto any potable water hose you already carry. You put the filter between the spigot and your fill hose, or between the hose and the deck fill, and every drop headed for the tank runs through it first. That's what pre-tank filtering means. You're cleaning the water on the way in, not asking a point-of-use filter to catch up later. On a boat you'd rig it the same way at the dock fill. On an RV it lives at the city-water spigot.

The filtration rating is 100 microns. That's a coarse sediment rating, and it's worth being straight about what it does and doesn't do. 100 micron catches grit, rust flakes, and the kind of sediment that stirs up when you draw off an old campground line. It is not a disinfection filter. Bacteria are roughly a micron across, so a 100-micron screen won't strain them out. The KDF and carbon combo helps control bacteria growth inside the canister itself and improves the taste, but if you're filling from a questionable well or a source you don't trust, add a finer point-of-use filter at the tap for drinking and cooking. We'd rather tell you that up front than have you count on it for something it wasn't built for.

What the carbon does well is taste and smell. Municipal water is usually chlorinated, and chlorine is exactly what activated carbon is good at grabbing. Run your fills through this and the flat, chemical edge on the water mostly goes away. The KDF side, which is a copper-zinc media, lends a hand with heavy metals and gives the carbon a longer, cleaner life. Together they're a sensible first line for anybody living out of a fresh tank.

A flexible hose protector is included on the coupling end. It's the spring-style sleeve that keeps the hose from kinking right where it meets the filter, which is the spot that always wants to crimp when you coil everything up. Small thing, but it saves the fitting over a season of connect-and-disconnect.

A couple of honest notes from setting these up. It's a single-canister filter with no bypass, so when it's time to swap it, the fill line is down until the new one's on. That's fine for most people, it's a two-minute job, but if you fill constantly you might want a tee and a valve so you can route around it. Make sure the garden-hose threads have their washer seated before you snug it down. A missing o-ring is the number one reason one of these weeps at the connection. And flow will taper as the element loads up, so if you're drawing off a silty source, plan on replacing it more often. Most folks run one per season of regular use and swap sooner if the water was rough.

Bottom line, it's an inexpensive, sensible piece of gear that makes tank water taste like water again. Camco's TastePure line has been the default fill-hose filter for RVers and boaters for years, and the 40013 is the straightforward single-filter version with the hose protector already on it. Screw it on, fill up, and forget about it until next season.