WaterPORT Weekender Tank Recognized as “Best Roof Rack Mounted Shower” by Field Mag

From the review -

Best Roof Rack Mounted: Tie Between Yakima RoadShower 7-gal ($449) & Klymit WaterPORT 8-gal ($384)

I wanted to choose between the Yakima RoadShower and the WaterPORT Weekender for this review, but ultimately both had such strong and varying pros and cons that I just couldn’t decide. So I made it a tie and laid all of the details out here, instead.

The Klymit 8.0-gal WaterPORT and Yakima RoadShower are respectively 8-gallon and 7-gallon water tanks that mount to some sort of roof rack on your car. They both come in other sizes, but I found these to be the most versatile capacities for a few showers and gear washes without having to fill up all the time.

They both have two fill options—a regular, larger opening and a pressurized hose connector—and they also both have shrader valves to add more pressure manually with a bike pump, if necessary (55psi for the RoadShower and 40psi for the WaterPORT). They both require rather painful installations, though the WaterPORT blows the RoadShower away when it comes to bad mounting experiences. That said, if your car and budget can manage it, I’d choose the WaterPORT or the RoadShower over any other shower on this list.

Now to the actual review: I’ll start with the positives, because there are quite a few. The WaterPORT is made of a food-safe plastic so you can drink the water that comes out of it (on the other hand, the RoadShower is made of aluminum, so Yakima does not advise drinking the water). Potable water is a huge plus for Klymit, as carrying a separate water container for drinking just feels like a pain in my relatively small Ford Ranger. The WaterPORT also comes with a 16ft, coiled hose that attaches via a quick connect system, and that hose has plenty of length to reach bikes and other gear that you may want to wash. The garden hose-esque nozzle feels sturdy and has plenty of settings with seriously impressive pressure. It has to be removed before driving and I thought stashing it would be annoying, but it actually didn’t bother me much.

The Yakima is more or less the same design, but made of aluminum so the water inside is not potable. That was the biggest drawback of the RoadShower, to me, and one that I think should be remedied by Yakima. Were that fixed, I might prefer the RoadShower to the WaterPORT. The RoadShower’s hose straps to the side of the tank, so it doesn’t have to be removed when driving, but the hose is substantially shorter than the WaterPORT’s. The head is also not quite as pleasant on the skin, though it does have a few adjustable settings. But the water pressure was equal to the WaterPORT so materials aside, the two are pretty much equal.

As big black containers exposed to the sun, the WaterPORT and RoadShower can both get extremely hot, inside and out. Luckily the RoadShower has a temperature gauge so you can tell when the water has gone from comfortable to way too hot. You’ll have to guess with the WaterPORT, so don’t spray any living creatures before checking.

The WaterPORT was primarily designed for the overlanding crowd, and those types of vehicles often have a platform rack instead of simple crossbars. It would also mount well on the type of roof racks you see on burly Sprinter vans. It comes with metal plates that supposedly give you a variety of mounting options with that type of roof rack, but for crossbars you only have one option that makes the WaterPORT sit a lot higher than the RoadShower. I didn’t realize this mounting hiccup originally and had to purchase a separate linkage bracket adapter, which increases the cost of the WaterPORT as well.

The linkage bracket adapter is one of my least favorite things I’ve purchased this year. $50 gets you eight flat pieces of metal and eight carriage bolts that require either two people or one person with a clamp and two wrenches to mount. The washers that come with it slip right through the metal holes, so I had to use larger washers from the original mounting kit. I don’t know why they couldn’t design something more similar to the RoadShower’s mounting system (a curved, padded piece of metal) but between the installation and the aesthetics, it’s a really bad solution.

That doesn’t mean that the RoadShower was a breeze, either. Yakima roof boxes are so easy to mount so they really need to transfer that technology over to the RoadShower. The carriage bolt system requires a wrench and no shortage of time and patience for the interminable twisting. It took about 1/3 of the time of the WaterPORT and only uses 4 carriage bolts instead of 8, but it still felt like an outdated system that’s due for a refresh. Nonetheless, it was significantly better to mount than the WaterPORT and I would recommend the RoadShower in a heartbeat to anyone with regular crossbars.

My RoadShower also did leak pretty substantially from the point where the hose connects to the tank, even when not in use. My extremely handy carpenter partner couldn’t even get it to stop, and based on other reviews, the RoadShower fittings seem to require a lot of tightening. I see RoadShowers everywhere so I assume it’s a resolvable issue, but the extreme amount of water spraying out of there whenever I tried to use the hose made the experience a little off-putting. This might have contributed to the fact that the RoadShower lost pressure more quickly than the WaterPORT, though it’s easy enough to top off with the Shrader valve. The WaterPORT, by contrast, was one of the only showers on this list that never leaked.

The WaterPORT is the shower that I still have on my roof, but that’s arguably because I’d rather die than touch the mounting hardware ever again. I genuinely like both of these showers quite a lot, but they do both have some serious flaws (mostly around mounting) that need some work. But once you get through the mounting process you have a water system that is good for so much more than simply showering, and that goes a long way in my book.

View the full review here - [ Article Link ]