RV Toilet Replacement: A User’s Guide
Dave SolbergReplacing your RV toilet from the standard plastic bowl to a nicer porcelain model is one of the easiest ways to make your rig feel more like home. If you’ve been considering upgrading your bathroom setup but haven’t felt up for the task of removing the old bowl to install a new one, let us put your mind at ease: the process is so simple you’ll wish you’d made the move long ago!
To help you complete a quick and easy RV toilet replacement, RV expert Dave Solberg walks you step by step through the project. He shows you how to remove the handle, shroud and casing from your plastic toilet to access the water lines, then explains what to do if you find the toilet’s mounting bolts are in the incorrect position to accommodate the new model. With Dave’s help, you’ll have the old bowl removed and the new one hooked up in no time flat!
If your existing toilet appears to be broken or in need of a quick fix, watch our video on RV toilet repair.
Over the past year and 1/2, we've had a lot of comments and questions coming in regarding RV toilets from our viewers. Some of them asked about how they can access the water system because they didn't winterize it and it froze. Others wanted to add a spray nozzle to it, some of them wanted to change out the toilet altogether because it was the plastic kind that's hard to clean and doesn't have quite the water flow in it to help clean it. So that gave us an opportunity with this unit here, which is a Sealand Traveler. And it is a porcelain one, but it's the very low style.
So we're gonna put in a larger one, but this will give us a good opportunity to show how you can access those water lines and the inner workings of this toilet. So we're gonna start off by taking off the outside handle here first. Okay, come out. Here we go. And all of this is, as you can see, it's just a decorative piece that goes on there, but it gives us really good access to all our valves, so forth, in here, water lines and everything.
So the next thing we're gonna do is just take the shroud off the bottom. There we go, and that gives us good access to that. And now we've gotten everything out of the way here, we see we do have access to the bolts on the bottom side of it here. And we're just gonna take a, there we go. Okay, once we've gotten those loosened, the next thing I'm gonna do before I get too far into the inside of this is I'm gonna put some gloves on, even though this is fairly clean, we just wanna put a plastic bag here just in case.
All right, now we should be able to pull this out, and that'll give us access to our water lines. Pop off and simply take apart. So now while we get this here, you can see that once you have access, you've taken the shroud off, you have access to the valve. This is the part here that would probably crack and be pretty easy to replace. Usually it's best just to take it out and do it on the bench.
So with that, we're gonna take this out and we're gonna prep this area, get ready to put our new one in. So we came into a little situation here, our mounting bolts on this flange here are four in a row. We need these to be off to the side like this, so I'm gonna take this flange off, see if I can move it around to the side or if I need to put a different adapter in, but we need these bolts to be off to the side. And they are pretty rusted here, so we're gonna have to soak them down really good. I might even have to cut them off, so we'll take a look at that and then we'll mount our toilet.
So now we've got our toilet in, we did have to put in a new adapter into the base plate of this to fit those two holes, we did also bust one of these bolts, you can see it right here. They are replaceable, you can get them from Thetford or from other toilet manufacturers, it's a pretty common item here. So now we've got the units mounted, what we're gonna need to do is hook up our water and just fasten these up. We got a nice porcelain toilet, a better height, and a really nice spray pattern inside here, so we've got a pretty nice unit, very easy to do, very accessible.
Adding a shut off valve while the toilet is disconnected and the water if off is a good idea in case of a valve leak in the future.
The rig that toilet was in seems to be about the same age as my 25yo Alpenlite, which has the same water lines and toilet. Over the years, the flange has leaked on mine a few times and I finally had to replace the floor in the bathroom. I considered changing the toilet also, but the old Sealand has been a great toilet and other than a leaking vacuum breaker was in good shape. I also did not want to deal with replacing or adapting the flange to today's 2 bolt toilets, as well as thinking that the 4 bolt setup gives a better distribution of the rocking forces on the toilet when it's in use. So the toilet got removed, floor replaced, vacuuum breaker replaced with out the sprayer which we never used anyway. and it's ready for another 25 years.
not very helpful Shows nothing about ring replacement or setting the flange
RV Toilet Replacement: A User's Guide comment: I wish you has shown how your fixed the flange and replaced the bolts. The replacement would have been useless without those repairs.and those skills are what most do-it-yourselfers need to learn in order to have any confidence to do the job. Instead, your video just raised my awareness that I am likely not to have the skills to do the job. This is a critique I have of many of your videos.
What a waste of time! It left out the most crucial part. How to replace the floor flange so the new bolts can line up.
Not very helpful. There is no video whatsoever of the new toilet being installed.