A hot shower after a dusty, sweaty day camping has long been a luxury mostly reserved for hardcore overlanders who invested in custom rigs complete with dual-battery setups and enough 12-volt gear to wire a small apartment.
The Australian-based brand Joolca built its reputation with this crowd when it launched the original HOTTAP back in 2012, which earned consistent praise among off-the-grid adventurers for delivering genuine on-demand hot water in the backcountry, though the revolutionary accessory didn’t launch in the U.S. until 2019. Its newest product, however, aims at a broader target: the car camper who just wants a clean rinse without engineering a custom rig to get it.
The Joolca HOTTAP Go – which was originally called the HOTTIE when the first production models were available in January – distills that overlanding pedigree into a more compact, self-contained unit that skips the need to source a separate water tank. Fill it before you leave camp, hook up a propane canister and a power bank, and you have pressurized hot water ready to go. That sounds simple because it mostly is — which is exactly what makes it interesting.
The nearly all-in-one solution
The outdoor shower market has grown surprisingly crowded, and the options now span a wide spectrum. At the bottom sit gravity-fed or foot-pump bags — cheap, light, but dependent entirely on the sun to warm the water. A tier up are powered sprayers like the RinseKit Pro, which deliver real pressure but no heat. Then come the propane-fired units that actually heat water on demand, the category where the HOTTAP Go lives.
Within that heated tier, the HOTTAP Go carves out a specific niche. Size-wise, it weighs just under 22 pounds before adding water, and takes up about the same amount of physical space as a 5-gallon Jerry Can (19.5 x 14.1 x 7.1 in). Joocla says those dimensions mean the Go can easily be stored in any mount designed to hold Jerry Cans.
