Poop

Let's talk about poop - not exactly everyone's favorite topic. Let's face it, most people that live in a house don't ever think about where the poop goes. Unless you live in a house with a septic tank, or are having plumbing problems, you never think about poop. When we lived in a house, we didn't; it just went away.

Every RVer thinks about poop, at least occasionally. Really, RVers think about all of the waste water that they generate. That includes not only the discharge from a toilet (the "poop") but also discharge from the bathroom and kitchen sinks as well as the shower.

Why is this? Are RVers anal about poop? (Sorry, couldn't resist the pun!). Not exactly. It's because all waste water discharges from an RV must be managed by the RVer. Actually, all utilities in an RV - waste water, fresh water, electricity and gas - must be actively managed by an RVer. This is probably the biggest single difference between living in a house and in an RV.

Our RV has three waste-water holding tanks, one for the poop (this is commonly called the black water tank), one for the bathroom sink and shower and one for the kitchen sink (these are commonly called grey water tanks); some RVs have only two tanks, one black and one grey. Our trailer is big, and is designed for full-time living. As such, the tanks are huge; they are 45 gallons each. We can, not surprisingly, go for many days without filling up the tanks.

Best practice for an RV is to let the tanks fill up and dump them when mostly or nearly full. Further best practice is to dump the black water tank first, then the grey tanks. This way, the cleanest water is dumped last, which has the virtue of any residue left in the sewer hose being relatively clean water. (There are a number of other best practices for waste water management, but I figure I've probably bored you enough with this topic.)

Normally, we stay in RV parks that have a sewer connection at the site. In these cases, I wander out every four days or so and pull the valves. Simple. However, we recently spent almost three weeks at a park that does not have a sewer dump at the site. Instead, there is a dump station on the main road. To use it, we have to hook up the trailer, drag it over to the dump station and take care of business. This is not a huge job; it takes maybe an hour start to finish. Still, we worked pretty hard to minimize the number of trips we need to make to the dump station during our 19-day stay here; we ended up having to dump only twice, although we left the place with full tanks.

RVers that dry camp - the term "dry camp" is used simply for camping without hookups - are well acquainted with managing their waste tank capacities. There are all kinds of tricks and techniques to employ, but they basically boil down to not putting water down any drain - toilet, sink or shower.

UPDATED - Busted Again - Sort Of...

<If you've read the original post, here's the update below. If you didn't read the original post and want the whole story chronologically, read the Original Post first. Also, I published some photos below, inserted into the original post. >

UPDATE: 

Ken, our mobile repair guy came out on Thursday (1/9). He is very confident that he can repair this onsite, which is the first bit of good news.

Also good news - we were able to get the slide evened out; if you look at the first photo below, the damaged end was sticking out while the undamaged (or so we thought) end was pulled all the way in. This makes the trailer much more liveable. The hallway was very tight access before; now, it is tighter than normal but much easier to move through.

A slight bit of bad news: the motor/gearshaft assembly (aka the "tower") at the back of the slideout is also damaged and will need to be replaced also; the shaft is visibly bent. My suspicion is that this was damaged after the front tower failed.

Ken will be in contact with Heartland to provide a quote and get approval. Since parts are involved, this may very well take several weeks to get the parts ordered and shipped.

Our original frustration and worry have been significantly reduced by both Ken's confidence in doing onsite repairs and in Heartland's (apparent) willingness to pay for this. While this may very well take several weeks, we are somewhat OK with that. Our forward schedule calls for us to be in Texas starting February 1; that might not happen. We're looking forward to meeting up with our friends Dennis and Leah there, but staying here in Tucson, enjoying the beautiful sunshine, won't be too much of a problem.

ORIGINAL POST:

It's been several weeks since I last posted. We had a warm and wonderful Christmas and New Years. I hope you all did the same.

What's the latest with us? Well, we left Long Beach on January 1 - not entirely by choice. We had hoped to stay through the weekend but the RV park we were staying in was full on January 1 - not the rest of the week, just that one day. It wasn't a big deal, since we were really pretty much done with the holidays. Both of us felt it was time to hit the road again.

As I've previously posted, our plans are to spend this month in Tucson and then head east to the Brownsville, Texas area. There, we are meeting our friends Dennis and Leah.

While in Tucson, we'd decided to take care of some business items: primarily annual dental checkups and annual maintenance for the trailer. Just about everybody recommends having the brakes and wheel bearings on a trailer inspected and serviced annually. In our previous trailer, we neglected this and paid the price: we had a wheel bearing run dry and seize and cause all kinds of expensive damage.

So, we'd made an appointment before we hit town to take the trailer in to the local Camping World for this service. This entailed disconnecting the trailer and towing it some five miles to their facility in the morning, and picking it up that night.

Doing this is where the fun began. We disconnected the various utilities and Cathy pulled the slides in. While she was pulling in the large bedroom slide - this is the one that has given us ALL of our previous problems - we both heard a loud clunking noise. I happened to be outside the trailer near this slide when it happened. I immediately saw the problem: one of the long metal "towers" that runs along the side of the trailer and contains the motor and gears had disconnected from the wall of the trailer. The six or so screws that held it to the side were either pulled out or snapped off.

We stared at it for a few minutes and decided that we could drive it in this manner. The slide was almost all the way in; the front, where the damage was, was sticking out a few inches but I thought it would travel OK to Camping World.

Wrong. We pulled out of the park and got up the road no more than a quarter-mile when I looked in my mirror and saw that the front of the slide was pulled out maybe 2/3 of its width - some 18 inches. I immediately pulled over and we inspected things. We tried retracting the slide, but that didn't work with the tower pulled free. We ended up turning around and slowly driving back to our site.

Notice how the front sticks out and the back doesn't!

Here's a closeup. The black piece at the front right, where the white-headed screw is, is supposed to be attached to the side of the trailer! You can see where all the screws have pulled out. 

I called a mobile RV technician that we had used last winter and felt was a very competent guy. He called me back in an hour or so. He initially told me that he couldn't (or wouldn't) fix this in the field but gradually warmed to the idea. He strongly suggested I call Heartland, the trailer manufacturer, since this was, in his opinion, a manufacturing defect. He also agreed to do a drive-by and inspect the slideout.

I agreed to call Heartland but thought it was a fool's errand. Wrong again. Once I explained the situation, the guy on the phone immediately told me that they'd seen this kind of thing before and had started using through-bolts, instead of just screws into fiberglass, to prevent this from happening. He said he would check to see if Heartland would cover the cost of repairs - AND THEY WILL!

So, right now we are waiting for Ken, our mobile guy, to inspect this; he's due here tomorrow (1/9) PM. We hope that he can repair it onsite. If not, by a happy coincidence this Camping World is also the local authorized Heartland repair facility.

I'll post some photos when I get better WiFi access (long story, here), but right now we are OK. While the trailer is stuck, it is liveable. The slide is popped back enough that we have access to the hallway, bathroom and bedroom. Although things are really cramped, we are just happy that, despite yet another problem with the trailer, we've got a path forward for repairs - at little or no cost to us.

Meanwhile, we are enjoying the warm sunny weather here in Tucson. I hope all of you are safe and sound. I'll post an update - hopefully, with photos - in a few days.