RV Foil Meal: Cajun Shrimp Boil

One of the not so pleasant functions of R VING is dumping the black water tank. Gray water tank is not quite so bad. Black water is gonna be sewage from the toilet. And one of the issues you find with the black water tank is almost all rvs at some point in time have monitor panel readings that are not accurate. So the way the system works, as you've got a positive wire coming into a probe that goes into the side of the tank.

And then over here you have another probe that's at one third, two thirds and full. And so as the liquid or fluid rises in there, it creates an arc across and it gives you the one third, two third, three thirds reading inside. The problem is is that when you go to dump your tanks, if you don't get it properly cleaned out and get everything off the side wall of that unit, you still get that circuit, which is called a closed circuit. So it gives you a false reading. It could be sludge on the side.

It could be calcium that's built up from the hard water. It could be toilet paper. It's a, it's a common problem with that and there's a couple different ways that you can eliminate that. Number one. If you have a black water flush valve that's mounted on the side of the actual, um, black tank, you hook up a garden hose to that and it's got an interior spinning little spigot that will clean the side walls, usually pointed right at the monitor panels or the, the probes inside there.

If you don't have one of those, you can use a wand. Like this one, you have to hook it to a garden hose and run it down the toilet. If you've got a 45 in the toilet, you're not gonna really get it down far enough. And it's a little messy. It's hard to get inside.

You got to hook it to a hose, either take it through a window on this case. The, the bathroom is right here. So we would have to go around to the entrance door and bring it in. So it's, it's a little messy to do it. But if you don't get that tank cleaned out really well, you're gonna have improper readings.

Now, here's a product that, uh, I've come across. It's really handy. We've got our Thetford hose here, which is a nice, really heavy duty hose. Typically you would hook this up with the bayonet, right. Like this dump the tanks.

Now, a lot of people think, you know, you're one and done and we've done several videos with several articles on this. If you just pull this and dump the tank and until it's empty and then hook up the gray or do the gray water tank, which is cleaner, you're still gonna have a really dirty black water tank. So you wanna fill that tank up again, which is either by using the black water flush valve that's in there or this tank here or the wand through the toilet. But here's a product from Valterra called the Hydro flush. And what they have designed as you hook this up to the tank here and then just hook up that bayonet.

Now, one of the things I do like about this is that it's a clear valve here or a connection. So I can tell when that tank is getting cleaner and cleaner. You'll be amazed at how much you're gonna get back in that black water tank out of it by filling it up. One, maybe even two, two times. But this will help you do that without having to go inside and, and do all that other stuff because this would be very hard to put a black water flush valve on the side of the tank because we don't have access.

Now, some of them you can do that as after market, but all we do is this, we'll hook it up, you see there, we got the water flowing through it. Now, I've got the valve shut here just in case we have something inside this, we haven't used this for quite some time, but it's gonna fill that up. It's gonna help clean it up. And so it's flushed that whole thing and then I'm just gonna kind of watch it. I wanna make sure I don't get it too high because it's gonna kind of back up on that toilet and, and I know what my, um, my capacity is in black water tank.

So that's important to know. So just by using this and then turning it off, I can, I can shut, uh, clean that valve really good on the inside of it and help get those monitor panels, probes cleaned out. Now, there's a lot of stories, I've heard people say, oh, I just dumped 23 bags of ice in. We've tested that it doesn't work. The ice doesn't break up anything in there.

Thetford does make a tank blaster, which if you do have some problems and you can't get this fixed. The tank blaster is an ice product to use to help clean that it kind of foams and it emulsifies in it. But this hydro flush makes it really easy to do that extra cleaning to keep those monitor panels, giving you the proper readings.