The wave of beautiful weekend weather which we have been waiting for has come and 'tis the season to work on the RV. The temperature hit the 70's today and we were eager to play with water! We got down to the serious business of investigating the leak in the water system. There are several interrelated problems at different ends of the water network and all of these issues prevent the water system from working fluidly: The first is that hose between the filler neck (the exterior portion where you insert a water hose to fill the potable water tank) and the tank is old, flimsy, and has several leaks. It needs to be replaced. The second is that the toilet is leaking due to either the crack in the side of the toilet commode, a gasket/o-ring that needs to be replaced, or a combination of both. A third problem that may be caused by lack of pressure because of the first two problems is that the water pump cannot deliver water to the kitchen sink.
To approach a solution to this problem, we decided to start from the outside in--beginning with the filler neck and fill hose. Last week, I gave details about pulling up the tank. We sanitized the tank with a cup of bleach and rinsed the tank out until the scent of bleach became undetectable. Here is a picture of the water tank as we were sanitizing it:
The water tank lives underneath the dinette bench seat closest to the cockpit.
Herein lies the water tank in the RV.
The tank has two outputs on the side of it: one to hook up a hose that runs to the water pump, where the water pump creates pressure to push water out to the shower, bathtub, and kitchen sink. The other output on the side of the tank is a drain spigot that leads to a hole in the floor to drain the tank.
The drain spigot was missing so the one that you see in the picture above is its replacement. Here is a closer look:
After replacing the spigot, we fit the tank into its spot underneath the dinette bench seat.
As you can see from the picture, there is no fill hose running from the tank to the filler neck. The boyfriend believes that we can use elbows, collars, and bushings to plumb straight access to the filler hose. I disagree, and I believe we just need to replace the damaged flexible hose that is there. We tried two types of hoses --flexible pvc and clear vinyl hose to little avail.
1.5 feet of flexible PVC cost around $6.00. 1 foot of clear vinyl tubing cost about $3.50. I was able to purchase a foot of plastic water tank fill hose for $1.50 from the Internet.
As for the toilet issues, the boyfriend removed the driver's seat to get to the water hookup that connects to the toilet. A broken threaded connector was responsible for the leaky toilet that flooded us out. He replaced this connector, but we could not evaluate the effectiveness of this solution without fixing the rest of the holes in the system.
When the weather is warm enough to play with water again, we will attempt to fix the system.
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