Our first “dumping” experience with the RV did not go quite as well as we had hoped. John rigged up a sewer connection in our basement for the RV’s dump hose. He felt himself quite clever and after looking at it I had to agree, it looked like it would work perfectly. Not surprisingly, gravity and physics play a big role in the dumping process.
We were on our way to Bloomsburg to work a gun show and wanted to empty our tanks before the trip. So we prepped the RV for travel and pulled up to our “dumping station”. I went down in the basement to “watch for leaks” and John stayed topside to work the controls. Everything seemed to be working just as it should. He emptied the black water tank no problem and then he started dumping the gray water tank. It was going well so he opened the valve more or whatever he did to get things to move more quickly. That’s when the exciting stuff started happening.
Gray water started spurting out of the sewer pipe, I started yelling for him to stop, but he didn’t hear me at first. Oh the SMELL!!!! The black water tank didn’t smell near that bad! Here is where our inexperience as RV’ers, failure to fully inspect and consider our dumping design, and not thinking that we should have communication devices so we could hear each other, came into full light.
After we got that under control, and the gray tank was empty he was ready to disconnect and roll up the hoses. The flowerbed and the window to the basement are higher than the driveway, meaning the dump hose (all 30+ feet of it) was full of water. As he tried to move the water along the hose came apart in the middle and spilled stinky gray water all over the driveway. What a mess.
Disappointed, but not beaten by his first idea for a dumping solution, John started researching options. “The Instinkerator” was born. Basically it is a garbage disposal (manufacturer name: InSinkerator) rigged with special hoses and adapters for the RV dump hoses. The poopy (or whatever) goes in, the Instinkerator grinds it up and pushes it down a small garden hose.
Our second attempt at dumping was bliss thanks to the Instinkerator; and the nice thing was, we didn’t have to move the RV to do it. Between gravity and the Instinkerator, everything was pushed along nicely into the sewer pipe even though it was close to 100ft away and slightly up hill.
