Installing a Water Pump

If the water pump in your camper has failed, or if you've got an older camper like this one and it's still working, but you wanna get ahead of the opportunity for that pump to fail while you're out with the camper, a water pump replacement is a pretty easy task. Now, in addition to getting ahead of the potential that it could fail in the future, I'm getting a handful of upgrades outta this one. With this particular pump, lots of good things going on. One, it is gonna increase my flow over what's in the camper right now. My gallons per minute rating is higher on this pump than on the old one. Additionally, this particular problem has made such that, we don't wanna run a pump dry, but if you do that with this one, 'cause accidents happen sometimes, you're not gonna instantly burn it up. The other thing that's cool about it, again, we don't want this to happen, but if it goes through freeze-thaw cycles, this pump can withstand a handful of freeze-thaw cycles, where a lot of other pumps can't. So, it's getting me more water flow, and also some protection. The other thing that I like about it, it's pretty cool is it comes with this strainer. So that's gonna go inline, and it's gonna eliminate particulates that might end up in my portable water tank there. You fill up at a camp ground, who knows what that water source is all about. So, that strainer is gonna be very helpful, and overall, a pump replacement isn't that hard to do. Let's do it here. This isn't a difficult thing to do, but there are some small details that you wanna make sure you get right as you're putting your water pump in. So, as much as you can do at the bench, do at the bench before you get in here, 'cause it's a little difficult to work at these tight spots. Make sure that you're using a potable water hose, not just any water hose to make sure that it's good for your drinking water that's gonna come outta this thing. Now, a little known fact, garden shears, pruning shears are a really, really good way to cut hose and work very effectively for this. As you're putting your parts together, make sure that you're using stainless steel hose clamps, not just hose clamps, because we are in a water environment here. That gets us to a point where, we're just about ready for final fittings down here. I have already made my electrical connections on both of these using the heat shrink connectors. And at this point, we can run on a couple more hose clamps. Then we can position the pump and get it screwed in place. So, part of what I'm doing here is I'm just allowing the pump to kinda find a natural rest position so that I'm not forcing it into some scenario that the hoses don't really wanna be in, and putting stress on the hose and on the fittings. And while we're talking about that, the other important thing is the hose. The recommendation here is that you go with flexible line right off of the pump. And part of what that's gonna do is isolate any vibration. Of course this pump is pumping. So as it's running, we don't want that vibration to transfer to hard plastic lines like we have coming out to the camper itself. So flexible line for a foot or more coming off of the pump itself. And let's talk about that vibration aspect a little bit. One of the things I like about this pump is, the base is actually flexible, not rigid. So when I screw this down, that's gonna help serve the purpose of dampening movement, vibration that the pump might have. Boy, that worked out really, really nicely with these fittings. I've got a couple more hose clamps to get on in the back there to finalize my connections. Then of course, as a last step, fill your water tank with water, run the pump, look for leaks. This is an easy upgrade to do, and it's nice, this insurance in a couple of areas that we're getting, like I talked about, that freeze factor, the run dry factor. I am getting more gallons per minute out of this pump. So there's a lot of good stuff going on here, and I have replaced a 23 year old pump on this camper, that of course, is gonna have a limited shelf life. So, this buys me some comfort of mind that I'm gonna have water when I'm out in the woods.