Product Review: The Camco Rhino Heavy Duty 36 Gallon Portable Waste Holding Tote Tank

This product review is our opinion of a product that we purchased. However, if you would like to use our affiliate link (in this post) to purchase the product, we may receive a small royalty.

Ah, the ins and outs of wastewater management in RV life. We’ve talked before about how important it is to ensure access the essentials of life: power, water, and electric. But with water comes wastewater, and even though it's something not a lot of people like to talk about, when living in a home-on-wheels, we need to somehow rid ourselves of our wastewater. When we have full hookups, this isn't a problem, as we just connect our hose to the sewer drain. However, some of the campgrounds we stay at don’t have sewer access at the site, and so wastewater goes into our gray and black holding tanks. As newbies, we quickly began to learn how to best conserve water, from navy showers and efficiently scrubbing dishes, to using the bathhouse or prepping food in advance before leaving a full hookup site. But there are limits to how efficient we can be, and sometimes we just want to stay in a non-sewer site longer than our tanks will allow.

Many campgrounds without sewer connections will have a dump station somewhere, but using it mid-stay would mean we’d have to go through the whole process of packing up, hooking up, leaving the site, heading right back and going through our whole setup process, like we would on a travel day. Big hassle. But at our first nine day no-sewer-hookup stay at Koreshan State Park, it became clear that our biggest limiter was the gray tank (sink and shower water).

So, we ordered the Camco Rhino Heavy Duty 36 Gallon Portable Waste Holding Tote Tank: a big plastic tank with wheels and sewer hookups, to let us transport our wastewater from our gray tank to a dump station without needing to move our rig (you certainly could use it for the black tank, but just be ready for the mess that extra moving of black water might entail). RVers often refer to it as a "honeywagon," named after the machines that actually will pump your wastewater out of the tanks. The Rhino tote comes with its own 3ft sewer hose, fittings, a short water hose to clean it out, and a metal tow adaptor to attach it to the hitch ball on our truck and drive it (slowly) to the dump station and back. Some RVers choose to just walk (or bike!) it if the dump station isn't too far away and the tote isn't too heavy. As for storage, if an RV has an outdoor ladder, the tote can clamp onto that so you don’t need to find a place to store it. We don't have a ladder, so we keep the tote in the bed of the truck - another reason we use it for gray water only.

Usage is simple:

1. Connect the RV sewer hose to the port on the top of the waste tote, so you can fill it all the way up, and open the air valve to keep pressure equalized.

2. Open the gray tank on your RV as you would normally, dumping into the tote the same way you would into a dump station or sewer hookup.

3. Close the gray tank, unhook the hose, and close all valves and ports.

4. Hitch the tote to the truck, drive to the dump site, and unhitch.

5. Dump out of the sewer port on the side of the tote, so it fully empties all the way to the bottom.

6. Clean the tote out with the flush hose.

7. Put everything away and drive back to the site.

Over all, the tote works as advertised, and makes staying at a non-sewer site for an extended stay much more pleasant and less stressful. We still conserve, since we don’t want to have to dump every day, but having the option means we can dump relatively easily when we need to, we don’t have to plan our water use as much, and we can spend more time in beautiful (and usually more affordable!) places.

But, the system isn’t perfect. The short sewer hose it came with had pinholes, so I just use the longer ones we already had. The 36 gallon size, the largest Camco makes, is smaller than our gray tank, so if we let it get too full, we may need to do two trips to fully dump. The most important issue, though is that the tote is too tall! The official description says your sewer hookup needs to be at least 13 inches above the ground to use it, which ours is. But, the tote itself is actually 15.5 inches tall, and that's not even counting the sewer hose that needs to connect on top of it. In other words, on level ground, the wastewater would need to travel up at least a few inches to get into the top of the tote! Since wastewater doesn't defy gravity, whenever I use the tote, I have to try to find a spot on the ground where it can sit lower than the camper. If I can’t find one, I need to fill it from the bottom/side port instead of the top, in which case I can’t fill it the whole way up. Also, because things aren’t flowing as smoothly, I usually have to deal with a little bit of gray water spillage when unhooking the hoses. Between this and the pinholes, I'd think once again about whether you'd want to use the tote for transporting black water.

Pros:

• 1. Peace of mind; no tank anxiety.
• Able to comfortably stay longer at sites without sewer hookups.
• Can be towed to the dump station instead of towing our whole rig.
• Large enough to empty an 80% full gray tank in one trip.
• Comes with all needed accessories.
• Can attach to ladder (on RVs that have them) for storage.

Cons:

• Too tall! The height makes it hard to use the tote’s full capacity, and also makes it harder to prevent spillage. This is the main reason why I don’t recommend using the tote for emptying the black tank.
• Heavy when full. A full 36 gallon tote weighs over 300 pounds. Lifting it to hook it up to the truck, and unhooking it at the dump station, isn’t easy. (Camco makes a more expensive four wheeled version that you pull like a wagon and never need to lift, but that one looks like it’s even taller). If you need a lighter weight, you can always fill the tote up only part-way, but this starts to defeat the purpose of getting the large sized tote in the first place.

Overall, the Rhino tote is a very useful product for us, despite its shortcomings...and by shortcomings, I mean, the fact that it needs to be a bit shorter to actually work properly. That said, when you learn how to work around the limits of the product, it can help you have a less stressful camping experience and lets you stay longer in sites that tend to both be cheaper and have better views and privacy than full hookup sites.