Selecting the Best Toilet Paper for Your RV's Waste System

Inaccurate readings in your black water tank could be caused by using the wrong toilet paper. Now, a lot of people think if it says "septic safe" on the back of it, that it's okay use in an RV 'cause it will break down and not cause a problem. But, there's different levels of how these are gonna dissolve. Now, we went out and we bought a variety of different models here. So, we have two of them that are actually recommended for RVs. We've got the Scotts Rapid Dissolve, RV and boats, as well as the Thetford RV and marine. And then we have just a regular household brand here, which is the Quilted Northern, but it still says on the backside that it's a flushable and septic tank safe. And even our Bargain brand here, this little 99 cent one. On the backside here, safe for standard septic system. So, a lot of people think that all these are good to use in RVs. What we're gonna do is we've set up a simulated holding tank here, black water tank, and we're gonna take a little bit of this toilet paper and we're gonna actually put them in, splash them around a little bit for a while, and then let them sit, and just see how well they dissolve over period of time. So, the first one we'll do is, we'll take our bargain brand here, and just do a couple of tabs of that. We're gonna actually mark these. So this one was the bargain. We'll take our Thetford Campa-Chem. A couple of clean sheets here and we'll start right there. Put those in there. Thetford. Our Quilted Northern. And, we have our Scotts. Finally, I'm going to just take a regular sheet of paper towels and show you what that's gonna do. We'll make it about the same size. So, we'll just put that in and just put in paper towel. So, we're just gonna take and swish it around a little bit, simulate it driving down the road, and then just kind of let it sit. We see a couple of these are already starting to disintegrate pretty fast. That's our Thetford, here's our Quilted Northern. And our Scotts and then paper towel. So, what we're looking for is how fast they start to dissolve. The other thing I kind of noticed was, as I was pulling these apart, that some of them were a little thicker than others, the thinner ones, so maybe personal preference on the style that you want as well, compared to how this is gonna start to dissolve. So, we're gonna let these sit, but we'll come back periodically and take a look at them and let's see how they work. So, last night we put different samples in the water in these Mason jars, and we let them sit overnight. So, they've been in there for about 12 hours. These are the two RV related ones. This is the Northern Quilted, and this was the bargain brand and the paper towel. So, we've got our Thetford RV Marine right here, Quilted Northern, Scotts, Bargain brand and our regular paper towel. So, we're just gonna see how well these fare, they're supposed to break down. We don't want to have big clumps inside it. So, they get onto the monitor panel probes and so forth. And we see this one, typical with a paper towel that it is. They advertise they're not gonna break down in water. So we have quite a large clump here that is gonna not only give us false readings but it'll also probably clog our valves maybe even clog inside the pipe itself. So, not a good idea to use paper towels at all. Our Bargain brand then is next. And even though it said it was good for septic, we see quite a few larger clumps out of this. It did break down a little bit, but we still have some pretty good. Put it on the side, it's gonna sit up against the side of our holding tanks. It's gonna cover our monitor panel. So, probably not a good product to use in an RV. Then our Quilted Northern. Again, this one actually said right on it here that it is a flushable and septic safe per standard sewer and step septic systems in here. And it didn't break down even as much as the Bargain brand. So this one, we're gonna have some problems with it, again, sticking to the sidewall, clogging valves, that type of stuff. So, not a very good product to use in an RV. Now, we have our two, Scotts and our Thetford and our Scotts actually says RV and boat and it's fast dissolving. And if we get a good shot of that, we'll see that broke down really, really well. I mean, there's no clumps in there. There's a few particles. You know, when I go to pull something up I have next to nothing in there. It's not going to sit up against the sidewall. So, that product performed excellent. And then our Thetford product and Thetford this is a Campa- Chem and Thetford is pretty predominant in the RV industry. They make a lot of toilet sanitizers, cleaners, that type of stuff. And so, they've got the toilet paper and we can see too that that one broke down real well. Pull this out. We've got no big clumps, just small little particles. If we can see inside there, it did really well. So, for our example here I would say, even though it says it's septic safe, that doesn't mean it's good for the RVs. Get the ones that are RV rated, that'll break down. You won't have problems with your monitor panel readings and you won't have problems with your valves.