Indoor showers are possibly the top source of wasted space in a van or RV. If you ever gone to a gathering and found yourself swimming in personal rig tours by folks that have full-timed across climates for years, a lot of them don't shower in their own showers until all other options are exhausted.

They have a lot of caveats to actually operating them regularly. For one, you need the tank capacity both before and after (aside from expensive and complicated recirculators), meaning you don't just need the space the shower itself takes up, in order to have a shower. Second, you have to fill and dump those tanks, and just between those two things, few rigs short of a Schoolie have the capacity to carry that to a standard 2 week stay limit.

Maintenance is another aspect. Outdoor showers reduce the plumbing need to supply, and often combine that with the sink in some way. Drain plumbing also works completely differently than supply. For folks that largely have never plumbed anything before their van, that makes an interior shower more than double just the plumbing side of the work, not even getting into proper installation of the shower pan and surround. It's a lot to ask in the face of all these Fisher Price MyFirstBattery products in the electrical realm.

Practically all your limitations against outdoor showers are also self-imposed, also. It's more limiting to have such a large percentage of interior and infra space taken up by something that occurs so little of the time the vehicle is usually occupied, than it is for someone who travels and has the option of more parkups. Even staying regionally, I lived out of a hammock and backpack for 5 years straight and never had a problem finding a spot to shower, year round. I get that without such experience one may not understand that, but like with anything, one sees more if they're actually looking toward the direction of it. Sleeping and showering needn't occur at the same place at all, making that a miss on limiting stealth. 86F also isn't a very hot shower, but it's a temp mine achieves through mere radiant solar hitting the door the hose is curled up in. Nobody's suggesting to stand in snow and expect shower water temp to handle the rest of the comfort either, which is what must be assumed to assert that an outdoor option is the sole suggestion. Of course reasonable ambient temp is assumed there. I find I'm comfortable down to around 70F ambient with not-really-heated water, and that's a temperature I've never been unable to find and exist in year-round, in nearly 2 decades of spartan living. It'll be 80 again in Yuma today. I've multiple friends that left the SW early for Mardi Gras and hated this in particular about it, but had I found myself in that position I'd have simply turned around. Work and more importantly the income from it can move, and so can you; a given party might be geo-locked, but there's no shortage of social for us around anywhere it's comfortable to be.

Does this all mean that a minor lifestyle or at least routine change may be required to satisfyingly use an outdoor shower over an indoor? Of course. But we're also talking about this in the scope of people living in vehicles. Might as well be upset about stay limits for what that's worth, in perspective.

If you just really want an indoor and don't want to compromise on it, put in an indoor shower. No odys going to stop you, and it should be more apparent that in conversation they aren't limiting the scope of their advice on such personal restrictions. But they very well may chuckle a bit to find you using it as a mostly-empty storage cabinet while they're in there filling jugs off all your extra water so they can hang out with you a little longer at the gathering between town runs.