Poo On You

One of the differences between living in a stick built home and a RV is that in a RV sometimes you get up close and personal with stuff you'd rather leave alone.  And that stuff would be in the sewage tank in the RV.

The set up of the toilet system in a RV goes something like this; the toilet flushes into a big square box that fastened underneath the floor of the RV.  It has an outlet leading to the outside of the RV, controlled by a push valve/gate system.  You attach a 4 inch accordion pleated hose to the gate valve and the other end goes into the campground's sewer system in the ground. Once a week or so, one needs to empty the "black water" (that stuff you flush down the toilet) into the campground's sewer system.  A simple process normally.

Not so for us this week; when Denny pulled the gate valve, very little came out of the black water tank, meaning something was blocking the hole leading out of the tank.  Sigh.  Stories have been told of plugs of plastic/flooring/whatever being drilled out and dropped down into tanks to be left there, free to float around and jam themselves into the exit hole.  Okay.  We have a spray wand that is inserted down into the toilet that helps to flush out debris and clean the tank, so I started trying to flush out the tank but it didn't seem to be working.  That's when Denny shoved the wand WAY down the tank and got it stuck.  Really, really stuck.  Like the only way to get it out was cutting the sewer pipe OF OUR TWO MONTH OLD TRAILER stuck.

So that's what we did.  Two 16 mile round trips to the hardware store because ABS pipe cement sets up faster than I believed possible so I didn't get the pipe shoved down into place soon enough so Denny had to saw the repair apart and do it again.  Five hours later the sewer wand was out and the black tank water was flowing, albeit less than we expected.  What I'm not mentioning was the efforts to go in backwards up the system with whatever long pointy things we could find which necessitated placing a large empty container outside the gate valve to catch whatever would flow out the black water tank should the obstruction clear.  This is not a pleasant process folks!  We'll know next week how the fix worked when it's time to dump again.

Man, we know how to have fun here at the RV Vagabond's house!