RV Mantaiance 101 Freshwater Tank

posted by tommyc @ 1:48pm, Wednesday 17 August 2011.

Tips for a Maintaining Trouble-free

 RV Holding Tanks

Holding tanks, certainly not everyone’s favorite part of the RV, but are a necessity when camping.

Most RVs have one black tank, one gray tank and one freshwater tank.

There’s no getting around it – without holding tanks we wouldn’t be able to enjoy the plumbing features in our RV’S.

So lets take a look at each tank separately.

Today we will talk about the Fresh water tank:

The freshwater tank known as potable water is a tank of water to use when there is no city water hook-up available

The water is pumped to your plumbing system by way of a 12-volt water pump, operated by a switch, the location of this switch is different in many RV’s but you can usually find it in the Galley or the Bathroom and sometimes both.

The most common maintenance task for the freshwater tank is sanitization. Remember, infrequent use can cause bacteria buildup resulting in bad tasting or smelling water or even something that can make you sick. (And we all know that being sick is no fun when camping)

The way Eliminate this is by sanitizing the tank with a bleach water solution. First drain your tank, now I know some are saying why drain the tank if we are going to put the water right back in, This is because we don’t want to have the old nasty water that is causing the problem in the tank we want to use fresh clean water.

Refill the tank half way with fresh water, add ¼ cup of bleach for every 15 gallons your tank holds, then finish filling the tank with fresh water.

if you do not have a gravity fill for your Freshwater tank you will need to purchase an attachment to siphon from one container while filling or use a hand pump designed to fill from a separate container. One such item is made by Aqua Pro and available at most RV supply stores.

Run “cold” water through your faucets, and then run the “hot” water (you do not have to heat the water cold water if fine) to get the bleach water solution in your hot water tank. Let stand for about four to six hours.

Drain the tank completely. You can do this with your water pump and open all faucets which would also put the bleach water into the gray tank and help clean it then dump the gray tank or you can empty the tanks using the low point drain (check with the campground first some do not allow dumping even fresh water on the ground)

Now some will say my water now smells like bleach, well we can fix this.

Mix a ½ cup of baking soda with a gallon of water; pour into tank and refill tank.

Open all faucets to allow this solution to pump throughout the system.

Drain tank once again and refill now it is ready to use. Even sanitized.

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