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Hi Jury

What do you use to clean the water system out with?

Lots of people recommend Milton, but if you have any metal water fixings anywhere in the sytem I wouldn't recommend this.  Milton does nasty things to metal...I remember foolishly trying to sterilise a spoon once, and it turned green and crusty after 10 minutes.

We use dairy bleach...but household bleach would be just as good.
Here's what we do:

Sterilization at 1 part per 1000 ratio is 20 minutes contact time. In other words if you had a 1000 gallon water tank fill it up and ad 1 gallon of bleach and let stand for 20 minutes and empty. In your case add 1 cup of bleach ( way over what's needed but it's cheap) and fill your tank to the top and run the bleach laden water through the faucet and let stand for 20 minutes (or go for a drive to really swill it about ). Then empty the tank and refill and flush twice. Then empty tank completely and leave open to atmosphere over night to vent any smell. You can also pour some Baking soda into one of your flush cycles and let it sit awhile. Baking soda will absorb the odors as well.

We rarely use the baking soda, and have never had any unpleasant bleach smel.. And the obligatory cup of tea tastes just as good as at home, if not better

We don't drink the water from our tank.  Instead, we carry a 10 litre can of fresh drinking water.  I think that's what most people do.

You can buy a little bottle of stuff to purify the water in the camping shops.  It's quite expensive but you only need to use a little.  We use this in hot weather or in France, just to make sure the water in the tank is pure enough for tooth cleaning and washing the odd tomato etc.

Like Ken we have similar procedures to keep water tanks and pipes fresh, although slightly different. 

Fresh water - before leaving for a trip we fill the tank to the top, run some through the taps and let the rest out through the drain.  We do this once or twice according to how long it is since we last used the MH.  About once a year we fill the tank with Milton solution and leave for 15 mins before letting out through the drain  ( we used to run it through the taps but stopped when we found that this could affect metal parts).  We keep a container for fresh drinking water and use this to fill a table top water filter which has a fitted tap.

Waste water - we put soda crystals and liquid washing detergent down the plug holes along with a  small amount of hot water at the start of a trip so that it cleans the waste tank as we go.  Found this as we did have problems with a smell from the tank and this seemed to cure it and keep it at bay.

Jean

try water purification tablets from your local camp shop

its what they were made for