Maintaining and Cleaning Your RV Holding Tanks

The dump system on your RV is going to consist of a black and a gray water tank. This model happens to be in a basement unit right here with nice service compartment. And we see the black water tank is in the back over here. Now they're not always going to be black and gray they actual tank themselves so they just referenced those. Some of them do that, but you can tell by the pipe size the larger three inch pipe size is gonna be the black water tank you've got more solids coming out of there.

The smaller inch and a half is gonna be your gray water tank. Now the black water tank is for the toilet primarily. Now, there are some manufacturers that dump a few of the bathrooms sinks in there I've seen even a couple of kitchen sinks that go into the black water tank, mostly because of where they're located in proximity to the tank rather than trying to get them all over the place. Now, some manufacturers make their own tanks so they can make them in shapes that fit underneath others buy a pre-designed tank and they're pretty much limited to put those into spaces, that they can fit into. So you do see a variety of different configurations where the kitchen sink may go into the black water but typically it doesn't.

Now the shower is going to go into the gray water tank and that's a cleaner water. I don't recommend dumping either one outside you wanna do it in a place that has sanitary facilities, has treatment facilities we are seeing a lot more of your rest stops around the country are offering that some of your fueling stations, the pilots, the flying Js have a dedicated RV site that you can actually dump into it. There's some good sites out in the market out in the internet that list dump stations around the country. So if you're traveling across the country it might be a good idea to visit one of those sites and just see where it's at. And I think they even have an app that you can find it.

So in this compartment right here what we've got again the black water tank sitting back in here, the freshwater tank we see right here. The way I would typically you wanna hook this up is first you wanna get a set of rubberized gloves you don't want those pathogens and so forth in there. You wanna check to make sure that your valves are closed, you probably will only do that once if you forget, by the time you get a nice surprise out of there it's a little challenging. Now, this actually is a working unit here when we brought this one in there was some stuff inside the hose here, that we had to dump out and clean up. And we had kind of fun with one of our extra extras in here.

Now this unit here we've got the cap up the front here, I make sure both of my valves are closed here before I take this cap off and hook my hose up. Now this hose has an aftermarket and put on it and this is designed to be able to put into your ground station where you're dumping at and you'll have a little lid you'll up and the flange makes it fit in better rather than just shoving the end of a hose in. So this would be aftermarket lets go and lay that in there. But with that I can't put it inside this this is a little trap door designed for the hose. If I'm gonna be at a campground for a long period of time, rather than having the door open and if it's a little chilly I can simply route this tap right through here and keep this door closed and keep it heated inside here.

I don't want to have it outside and even for security purposes too. Nobody can come in here you'll probably be carrying some extra electrical cords and that type of stuff. So I'm gonna hook this up here and just show it's a nice easy hookup like that. If I am staying in a campground for a long period of time I don't wanna have these valves open all the time for dumping because I'm gonna get the smell out of the underground sanitary system coming back up into the coach we wanna make sure we keep that door closed all the time. Now to dump this the easiest way to do it is do the black water first and then do the gray water.

The gray water will allow you to rinse that hose off a lot easier. After I'm done dumping then one of the things I can do typically I would run this out rinse it out with a hose, now I can take, there's a couple aftermarket products here. Cameco has one it's really handy. And this is just a cap that would go on this and I can hook my garden hose up to it. So I could put a quick disconnect on here like I've got on the side of my unit.

So when I bring my hose out in fact I'm gonna do that right now. So I'd have my hose that I would typically be using this one, I would not use this one. I would actually use a regular garden hose that's my drinking hose so I'm not gonna use it for anything with the sanitary system. I'm gonna leave that separate over with there. So I would take my regular hose and we've got our quick disconnect that goes in.

Basically just like that and then I'd have a hose on it. So once I got done dumping here I could just come in here this is just a little cap simulates exact same thing I just did put it in nice and tight click it on like that hook my hose up, and I can just clean this whole thing out. And then I don't have any water splashing up I don't have to worry about any sanitary issues with this if I put a hose in here I'm still gonna have those ribs and it's gonna throughout the inside of it. So nice little aftermarket piece to use. And then this one's gotta just a little bit of a tape.

There we go. Fairly new still. So also in here, we see that we've got these probes on the side now and these are the older style probes, they're pretty typical they've been used for many, many years. The way they're designed that little screw goes right through the tank. And there's a probe on the backside of this here.

And then we've got our one line that comes in here and then the cross line over here. So as our water system fills up then it arcs across here and it gives us our reading. So we're gonna start to see where it's a quarter, a half, three quarters. Some of them go by thirds like a third, two thirds and full but as it comes up these probes it gives us our reading. It's very common for these to have inaccurate readings and a lot of times what happens is even in the freshwater tank which you would think there's not a lot of solids, there's not a lot of stuff that could arc across here, in the freshwater tanks we could have calcium, we could have lime, so that stuff could give us inaccurate readings.

It's pretty common in the blackwater system because we have a lot of toilet paper we have a lot of solids. We're probably not using the right toilet paper instead that'll break down and cause that so a couple of things that you can do, first of all you definitely wanna use a deodorizer, a sanitizer, there's a lot of systems out there. Thetford makes some, it makes some organic systems as well that are very biodegradable and environmentally safe, so check those out. And something that you can do to help clean that out is if you're starting to get inaccurate readings there's a little trick you can do where you take about four or five bags ice and just open up the toilet dump them down in the toilet and put about half a tank worth of water in and then just drive around and let it work out. Sometimes you might have to do it for quite some time, just leave them in there for a trip or something like that.

Those ice cubes are gonna start breaking up anything that's on the sidewall and you might have to do it two or three times. Drain it out, see how well it's working just keep doing that. But that ice for a period of time there is gonna help knock some of that stuff out and clean it out. Now, we also have a black water flush system there's either a manual version or one that you can literally hook onto the inlet of your black water tank. And the manual system is you take a stick inside and clean it out through the toilet.

The automatic system is just gonna have a wand that's set up into the tank. You hook a garden hose to that and that wand inside just works its way all around and it's gonna clean that whole tank up in the inside of it. Now, the best thing to do in my opinion is replace these completely. There is a stick on version that just uses ultrasounds, so I can pretty much leave these right the way they are I don't have to worry about the probes on the inside. And I just put patches on this outside peel them off, stick them on a lot of the newer units have that I don't have to worry about anything inside giving me a false reading.