Guide · Aires · Jul 20, 2026

Service points: water, waste and how the borne actually works

A borne handles three different things that first-timers mix up: drinking water, grey water and the chemical toilet. How to tell them apart, how to pay, and why the service point is often not where you sleep.

FreeCampMaps Team Editorial team · 9 min read 9 sources cited

A borne is the service pillar on a French aire: a waist-high post or cabinet that gives you drinking water and often electricity, standing next to or over a drain that takes waste water, with a separate and smaller point for emptying a chemical toilet.

That is the whole machine. The complications are that it handles three different substances that must not be confused, that it wants paying in a currency you have to buy in advance somewhere else, and that it is frequently not at the place you intend to sleep.

The vocabulary changes across borders and the object does not. In Germany the whole installation is a Ver- und Entsorgungsstation, a supply and disposal station. If you have not met the rest of the words yet, start with what is an aire.

Three different things, three different holes

This is the section that saves you an unpleasant morning.

1. Fresh water. Drinking water, from the public supply, out of a tap or a hose fitting on the borne. It goes into your fresh tank. Nothing that has been inside your vehicle ever goes near it.

2. Grey water. The used water from your sink and shower. It leaves through a drain valve under the vehicle and goes into a grating in the ground, which is usually a shallow drive-over grid you position the vehicle across or beside.

3. Chemical toilet waste. The contents of the cassette: sewage, plus whatever additive you use. It goes into a separate, smaller, sealed point, often a lidded bowl or a small inspection chamber, and often a short walk from the grey water grating rather than beside it.

The classic first-timer error is treating the ground grating as a general-purpose hole, and rinsing a cassette over it or, worse, filling a fresh tank from a hose that lives beside it. Anor’s commune page describes its borne as handling waste water, chemical toilet emptying and drinking water at one installation, which is the normal French arrangement, and normal does not mean interchangeable. Hendaye’s arrêté is explicit that chemical waste goes into the designated receptacles connected to the sewer and that waste water is discharged only at the point provided. The Rothsee rules state that the disposal station is what you use for dirty water and for chemical toilet contents, and that fresh water may be drawn only from that supply station.

Two habits that follow from this and are worth building early:

Carry a dedicated fresh water hose and keep it somewhere your waste equipment never touches. Colored fittings help.
Rinse the cassette using the rinse tap provided at the disposal point, not the drinking water tap.

Nothing goes on the ground. Article 185 of the Codice della Strada prohibits discharging organic residues and both clean and foul water onto roads and public areas outside a proper sanitary disposal installation, for any vehicle with internal collection tanks, with an administrative fine of 87 to 344 euros. The behavioral side of this is covered in aires etiquette.

Eau potable, eau non potable, Trinkwasser, Kein Trinkwasser

Read the tap before you fill from it. The words are short and they are the whole answer.

France. Eau potable means drinking water. Eau non potable means water that is not for drinking, which on an aire usually feeds a rinse tap or a wash point. Labeling non-potable outlets is a legal requirement rather than a courtesy: the arrêté of 12 July 2024 on the sanitary conditions for using water unfit for human consumption in domestic uses requires “une signalétique « eau non potable » au niveau des points de soutirage”, distinct and explicit marking of the pipework carrying it, an absence of proximity between non-potable outlets and taps supplying water intended for human consumption, and a locking device at the non-potable outlets. That is the standard a compliant French installation is being held to.

Germany. Trinkwasser is drinking water. Kein Trinkwasser is not, and it is usually shown as a crossed-out drinking glass in a red circle as well as in words. Operators also use Frischwasser, fresh water, for the potable supply on the borne: the Rothsee rules use Frischwasserbezug for taking on fresh water at the disposal station, and Bad Rappenau uses Wasserversorgung for its water columns.

Elsewhere. Acqua potabile in Italy, agua potable in Spain, drinkwater in the Netherlands. The negative usually carries the local word for “no” plus a crossed-out glass, and the pictogram is the part that travels.

Do not fill your drinking tank from an unlabeled tap. Use it for rinsing and take drinking water from a labeled one. On a French service point the non-potable outlet is often the rinse tap standing right beside the drinking one, which is exactly why the labeling is a legal requirement and exactly why you read it in daylight rather than at 10pm by torch.

Jetons, coins and cards

Assume there is nobody there. There is rarely a warden, an office or anyone to ask, and the machine will not explain itself.

Jetons. A jeton is a plastic or metal token that runs the borne. You buy it elsewhere in town, before you get to the aire, and usually in business hours only. Anor sells its jetons at the syndicat d’initiative, at a Carrefour Contact and at a bar-tabac-presse. Bénéjacq’s borne delivers water and electricity on tokens bought at the mairie or in the shops on the Place de la Fontaine. Those are the usual three sources: the mairie or town hall, the tourist office, and whichever local shop agreed to stock them. If you arrive at eight on a Sunday evening, you may find water in the tap and no way to turn it on.

Tokens are not interchangeable between communes. A leftover jeton is a souvenir.

Coins. Common in Germany, and specific about denominations. The Rothsee power columns take direct payment in 2 euro, 1 euro and 50 cent pieces. Coesfeld runs paid machines for electricity and fresh water while parking itself is free and the disposal installation costs nothing. Carry a working stock of coins and do not rely on breaking a note anywhere on site.

Cards. Larger and busier sites run automated terminals. Hendaye’s municipal aire takes bank cards at a terminal and issues a ticket that doubles as the access code for the barriers and the service stations. Bad Rappenau is cashless on a site card. The Rothsee parking ticket machines accept EC and credit cards as well as coins.

Two things worth knowing about card sites. A barrier holds your vehicle behind a gate, so a terminal that will not read your card is a problem at both ends of the stay. And foreign cards do not always work on older municipal terminals, so having coins as well is not paranoia.

What one payment actually buys

There is no national standard and no standard price. Here is what four communes actually charge, which is the range to budget against.

Hendaye. 10 euros for 24 hours, which includes 100 liters of water and an hour of electricity. 20 euros for 48 hours and 30 euros for 72, as two and three daily packages. Service-only access is 2 euros per resource, water or electricity.
Bad Rappenau. 1 euro for 80 liters of water on the site card, and 1 euro per kWh of electricity, on top of 19 euros a night for the pitch.
Coesfeld. Parking is free, the disposal installation is free, and electricity and fresh water are paid at machines.
Anor and Bénéjacq. Parking free, borne on jetons. Neither commune publishes a price, so buy a jeton or two when you buy them and expect the couple of euros the communes that do publish a price charge.

Some taps are timed and some are metered. One machine delivers a set volume, the next runs the tap for a set number of minutes, and the panel tells you which. Read it before you pay. If it is timed, have the hose connected and the filler cap off first, because the clock does not wait for you.

The pattern worth carrying is that free parking and paid services is very common, so “free aire” often means a free night plus a couple of euros for water. A listing that says free is not telling you the whole cost.

The overnight stop and the service point are usually not the same place

This is the planning point, and it is the one most likely to change how a day goes.

Plenty of free stopovers are free precisely because there is nothing on them. A Stellplatz can be a car park with no installation at all. A small French aire may have a borne that has been out of order for a season. And some service points are attached to somewhere you would not want to sleep, on a supermarket forecourt or beside a main road.

So plan the service stop separately from the overnight stop. Concretely:

Treat water, waste and sleeping as two errands and one night, not one stop.
Service on the way out in the morning rather than on the way in, if the overnight site has no borne. You arrive at the next place with empty tanks and a full one.
Know your real range in nights rather than liters, and keep a night in hand.
Where a site restricts its installation to paying guests, that is written down and enforced. The Rothsee disposal station may be used only by paying guests and by guests of the neighboring municipal Stellplatz at Hilpoltstein.
Do not count on a single borne. If it is broken, occupied by somebody doing a full tank fill, or shut for the season, you need a second option in the same hour of driving.

The broader version of this thinking sits in motorhome travel in Europe.

Winter: assume the water is off

Operators drain service points to stop the pipework freezing, and they do it on a schedule rather than in response to the weather.

The Rothsee rules state that the supply and disposal station is closed during the frost period.
The commune of Aube, in the Orne, keeps its aire open all year but closes the water distribution borne from December 1 to March 1.

Neither of those is a rule you can carry anywhere else. They are two examples of a widespread practice, and the dates are set locally. Some newer bornes are built with trace heating and run through the winter, so treat an open one in January as luck rather than as the plan.

What this means for a winter trip is unglamorous and worth planning around. Carry more fresh water than you think you need. Expect grey water disposal to be unavailable at the same sites where fresh water is off, because the installation usually closes as one unit. Check whether the commune or the Stadt publishes seasonal dates before you route around a single site, and treat a motorhome app’s amenity flags as a lead rather than a fact.

The sign wins

The posted sign on the borne, the operator’s current rules of use, and the commune’s current arrêté beat this page, beat any app, and beat what was true last season. If the tap says eau non potable and a listing says drinking water, the tap is right. Prices and volumes change faster than anybody updates a web page, so carry enough coins to be wrong about the price.

What is an aire: the vocabulary, the payment models, and how long you can stay.
Aires etiquette: what you owe the person behind you at the drain, and which parts of that carry a fine.
Wild camping vs free camping vs aires: three different acts under three different bodies of law.
Motorhome travel in Europe: the planning layer, including how to sequence service stops across a route.
France: the country hub, and the densest borne network in Europe.

Sources

Where the original is not in English, the summary above is ours and the linked text is the authority.

Frequently asked

The questions people actually ask.

What is a borne?

A borne is the service pillar on a French aire: a waist-high post or cabinet that dispenses drinking water and often electricity, usually standing beside or over a drain for waste water, with a separate point for emptying a chemical toilet. Anor, in the Nord, describes its borne as letting you empty waste water and chemical toilets and take on drinking water. The German equivalent is a Ver- und Entsorgungsstation, the supply and disposal station.

What is the difference between grey water and chemical toilet waste?

Grey water is the used water from your sink and shower. Chemical toilet waste is the contents of the cassette, which is sewage plus whatever additive you use. They go to different places on a properly built service point, and mixing them up is the classic first-timer error. Hendaye's arrêté requires chemical waste to go into the designated receptacles connected to the sewer, and waste water to be discharged only at the point provided. Article 185 of Italy's Codice della Strada prohibits discharging organic residues or waste water on roads and public areas outside a proper sanitary installation, with a fine of 87 to 344 euros.

How do I know whether the water is drinkable?

Read the label on the tap. In France the words are eau potable for drinking water and eau non potable for water that is not. Signage at the point of withdrawal is a legal requirement for non-potable systems: the arrêté of 12 July 2024 requires a signalétique 'eau non potable' at the points de soutirage, distinct marking of the pipework, no proximity between non-potable outlets and drinking water taps, and a locking device on the non-potable outlets. In Germany the words are Trinkwasser and Kein Trinkwasser, the latter usually shown as a crossed-out glass. If a tap carries no label at all, keep it out of your drinking tank. Use it for rinsing, and fill from a labeled tap at the next site.

What is a jeton and where do I buy one?

A jeton is a token that runs the borne. You buy it somewhere else in town, before you arrive, usually in business hours. Anor sells its jetons at the syndicat d'initiative, a Carrefour Contact and a bar-tabac-presse. Bénéjacq sells them at the mairie or the shops on the Place de la Fontaine. Tokens are not interchangeable between towns, so a leftover jeton from the last commune is a souvenir.

How much water does one payment give you?

It varies by site and there is no national standard. Hendaye's 24 hour package at 10 euros includes 100 liters of water and an hour of electricity, with service-only access at 2 euros per resource. Bad Rappenau charges 1 euro for 80 liters on a cashless site card. Some taps meter by volume and some run for a fixed time, and there is no national standard for either, so the number on the machine in front of you is the one to work from. Carry coins, expect a couple of euros for a tank, and do not plan a fill around a price you read online.

Will the water be working in winter?

Often not, and it is a scheduled shutdown rather than a fault. Operators drain the pipework to stop it freezing. The Rothsee rules state that the supply and disposal station is closed during the frost period. The commune of Aube, in the Orne, opens its aire all year but closes the water distribution borne from December 1 to March 1. Neither date is a standard. If you are traveling out of season, assume the borne may be dry and carry enough water to reach a site that is open.

More · Aires

Keep reading.

All in Aires

Aires etiquette: the unwritten rules Most of the etiquette on a motorhome aire is written down somewhere, and some of it is law. The reference version: what is a courtesy, what is a house rule, and what carries a fine. What is an aire? Motorhome stopovers explained An aire is a designated motorhome stopover, usually municipal, often free, and almost never a campsite. What that means in practice for a first-time visitor, with the rules cited.