RV Life Season 3

Common RV advice we're glad we never took (tanks edition)

Nicole Anderson, Anthony C Vicari

20 Aug 2024 • 13 min read

💡

In our last post, we covered a whole lotta advice we didn't take about our RV and our travel life. Today, we continue our rebellion! This time, we're covering all of the tank-related advice that we've put a lid on over our years of travel. This includes fresh tank, gray tank, black tank, and toilet-related advice. Time to flush it all out!

This blog post contains Amazon affiliate links. We may receive a small commission for products ordered through these links. Thank you for using these links to help support our blog!

Tanks seem to be quite the debated topic in the RV community. We even covered black tank debates in a previous blog post. So it was no surprise that, when we listed out all the RV advice we didn't take, tank-related advice was a popular category. Instead of cramming them among all of the other RV advice, we decided to give them their own blog post. We have to say, a lot of these we've changed our opinions on over the years, sometimes more than once. This just shows that tank-related advice is not typically a one-size-fits-all situation. Except for leaving your black tank closed until it's time to dump. This one is non-negotiable unless you want some very gross buildup.

"Never leave your gray tank open! Bugs and critters will get in through your sewer hose!"

The gray tank, however, is not the black tank, and we have talked before about the great gray tank debate, aka whether or not campers should leave the valve open when they're on sewer hookups. Unlike the black tank, less solids should be going down into your gray tank, but it can happen with food particles, hair, etc. Typically these are small enough to pass through the sewer pipes without needing too much water. When it comes to this gray tank debate, we've gone back and forth, and then back again, and then forth again. We've mostly settled now on keeping it open when we plan on using a lot of water for showering, washing dishes, etc. What we have never experienced, however, is an incident where critters or bugs climb up through our sewer hose and into our RV! When we hook up our sewer hose, we create a p-trap so gasses don't come up from the ground. This p-trap should also keep any unwanted visitors from coming up the hose. If you're wondering if this is a real concern, yes, sewer flies and other creatures could come up the drain and through the sewer hose. However, some RVers have mentioned this happening even with their valves shut, and typically a p-trap and regular flushing of the tanks works well. If the idea of critter invasions is too cringeworthy for you, feel free to keep that gray tank valve shut.

"Make sure you flush your toilet for at least 30 seconds to avoid buildup in your black tank."

The black tank should always have some water in it to keep waste from building up, but in terms of how much water to flush down the toilet each time you go, we've heard it all. One of the RV influencers that we follow, who typically knows a lot of things about a lot of things, has on more than one occasion talked about flushing number 2 for 30 seconds, and we've always scratched our heads at this notion. First of all, let's be clear that when he says to flush for 30 seconds, we can safely assume he doesn't mean keeping the toilet flap open for 30 seconds. Instead, fill the toilet bowl for several seconds, do your business, and then fill it some more and flush it down. This will keep odors from escaping through the open flap. That all makes sense, but this 30 seconds advice gives us pause. Some campgrounds have higher water pressure than others. We have been places where the incoming water is a mere trickle, in which case, 30 seconds probably wouldn't even suffice to adequately flush everything. However, in most of those cases, we would run the water pump to get more flow. When we have decent water pressure or are using our pump, we do not need to flush for 30 seconds. In cases where we don't have sewer hookups, we don't want to use that much water unless it's actually needed, and frankly, most times it's not. We'll spare the imagery here as best we can, but the flush time will depend largely on the amount of waste and the texture of that waste. We operate on a case-by-case basis to determine our flush time, and this has worked just fine for us.

Speaking of avoiding buildup...

Best practice for black tank maintenance is to use an enzymatic treatment once in a while to break down any residual gunk left behind when flushing the black tank...only, is it indeed best practice? Enzymatic treatments kill bacteria, which is good, but they also kill odor-eating bacteria, which is not ideal. Some RVers claim that treatments can leave a murky sludge at the bottom of the tank, but other RVers have tested and mythbusted this, at least when the black tank contains enough water at all times. We have heard countless recommendations for all kinds of RV treatment solutions, from Happy Campers, to Unique Digest-It, to Matt's Liquified RV Toilet Treatment, to many others. We have also heard the advice to dump a bunch of ice cubes into the tank and let them slosh around on a drive day. Heck, we heard one guy advise to let the full black tank slosh around on a drive day!

We have tried a lot of the above, and granted, many of the enzymatic treatments were used before we figured out our black tank odor origin, so perhaps now we wouldn't worry so much about the treatments breaking down the odor-eating bacteria. However, we can say with confidence that the ice cube advice should not be heeded. You would need a ton of ice, the sloshing isn't vigorous enough, and the ice melts anyway. We learned this from one ice cube attempt ourselves and a productive discussion with a tank cleaning pro. Typically, we opt for a classic solution: Calgon and Pine Sol. This combination disinfects, lubes the sides of the tank, and keeps things smelling fresh. The tank cleaning pro taught us this, too. That said, because we full-time and have a built-in tank flush, our tank stays pretty darn clean just with our regular dumping and flushing. We use the Calgon and Pine Sol solution every other time we dump our tanks, give or take.

"Only use RV-safe toilet paper."

When we were newbies, we bought RV-safe toilet paper for a while, before we realized that it was a total waste of money. Some RVers have actually conducted tests and found that RV-safe TP doesn't even dissolve as well as normal TP! The advice we often hear is to use a septic-safe single ply paper...only we don't heed this advice, either. We have found that single ply is hard to come by, and so we often use double ply, and it's worked just fine. Some brands dissolve better than others. The key for us has been to use only as much as needed, to make sure the toilet has enough water to submerge the paper, and to flush the paper in the bowl for a couple of seconds before letting it go down into the tank.

"Don't drive with a full fresh tank."

Many RVers choose to fill their fresh tank close to their destination, so they don't need to travel hundreds of miles with a full fresh tank. This choice usually stems from the extra weight that a full fresh tank can add, and lots of RVs are near or past their weight maximum as it is. We have room to spare before hitting our weight limit, so traveling with water in our fresh tank isn't a problem in that regard. However, our fresh tank is 100gal, which means that when full, we add 800lb to our trailer. Still not enough for us to exceed the limit, but we can't imagine barreling down the road with 800lb pressing on our fresh tank brackets. We have already lost two of them! However, now that the brackets are replaced and secured better, we don't worry too much about filling our fresh tank up to 3/4 of the way full. We have traveled with this much water in our fresh tank many times without issue.

"Don't fill your fresh tank at the dump station."

You're at the dump station waiting for someone in front of you to finish up. The station has two water hoses, one for non-potable water and one for potable. The person in front of you finishes dumping and disconnects his sewer hose, but before putting it away, he grabs the water hose to rinse out his sewer hose. Only, oh no! He grabbed the potable water hose by mistake! Ewwww!

This is the very scenario that causes RVers to offer the advice that, no matter what you do, do not fill your fresh tank at the dump station, even with the hose marked potable. Instead, find a separate spigot either at the campground or elsewhere, and fill up there. Disgusting as the above scenario is, we've never actually seen it for ourselves. We believe other RVers when they say they have, but maybe we've just been lucky – if we can call blissful ignorance of such an atrocity "lucky."

Really, though, we are aware that people do things like this, but we still sometimes fill our fresh tank at dump stations. First off, some dump stations keep the potable spigot far away from the rest of the apparatuses. Some RVers think this doesn't matter, but it definitely does because people will go for the more accessible hose first. Second, we disinfect the end of the potable water spigot no matter where we fill, whether it's our own campsite, a central spigot, or a dump station. Then we connect our own hose and always use our filter. We have Clear20 inline filters which go between the spigot and rig, plus a .5 micron filter under our kitchen sink for our drinking water. We haven't died yet!

Now, picture this: The person who just dumped his tanks in front of you finishes up and packs everything away in his camper. He proceeds to drive away without washing his hands. Now this we have seen many times. Think of how many things people touch after not washing their hands, central water spigots included. Disinfect every opening that will come into contact with what you think and hope is fresh water. That is advice we live by. Literally.

"Don't sanitize your water lines with bleach."

We read a lot of information about this when the time came for us to sanitize our water lines. Unless you have a medical reason to not use bleach, a little bit run through the lines is absolutely fine, when diluted properly. A quarter cup for 15 gallons of water is all you need. Then make sure you run tons of fresh water through the lines to flush out all the bleach, to the point that you can no longer smell the solution. Last summer, we noticed that our fresh water was contaminated with algae, something that is actually fairly common. The only solution that worked was bleach water, and we had to do this 3 times before we successfully cleared all the algae. At the end of the day, we are getting water from so many sources all over the country, and we can't control how clean those sources are. We do the best we can by using multiple filters, not letting the water sit in our fresh tank too long, and monitoring the look, taste, and smell. With all of these unknowns, a touch of bleach running through our lines is the least of our worries.

"You can't use your toilet when your RV is winterized."

Because we full-time in our RV all year long, we seldom winterize our rig, but we have done it once. When we first moved into the RV, we got delayed leaving Massachusetts and ended up spending the majority of winter stationary at our home-base: Nicole's parent's driveway. We winterized our RV because our water pump wasn't working properly, so we opted out of using any of our water system. This left us in a predicament because we thought we needed to run inside the house every time we needed to use the bathroom. Then we had our RV driving school, and our instructor informed us that nothing bad will happen if we use a winterized toilet once in a while. Anything that goes down there wouldn't freeze because the antifreeze wouldn't let it. We couldn't exactly flush our toilet because of our water pump issue, but we were able to use water bottles. We wouldn't make a regular practice of using a winterized RV toilet, but to know that we could in a pinch really saved our bladders.

It's crazy to think about how many things we've learned about tanks and bathroom behaviors since beginning our RV life. The advice is plentiful because these are activities that we all do! We can't survive without hydrating, nourishing ourselves, and then expelling the unneeded waste, so we better optimize our ability to do these in our RVs so we can stay healthy and happy. We have a whole plethora of tank and toilet-related posts ourselves, if you would like to continue to go down this hole. Don't forget to subscribe to our blog when you finish reading, because you never know what stories we'll be telling next, or just how crappy they might be.