February 18, 2008
Posted by BillAdams

( 1 rating )

You may get a million answers to this, but the answer is "maybe, maybe not". Maintenance of the holding tanks takes a bit of work, but nothing special. You should ALWAYS wait until your tanks are at least 2/3 full before dumping. This will help give you a complete flush when you dump. First let the black tank empty and then empty the grey to flush the hose clean. Never leave your holding tank drains open and never travel with your black/grey tanks completely empty. If you full-time your sensors are more likely to remain accurate if you just ensure that you have at least a couple of gallons of water in your tanks while you drive. This will usually keep the crud off the sensors. If you are stationary for long periods of time you may want to try adding some of the chemicals (no formaldehyde) that are designed to clean your sensors. Imagine that the sensor is just the end of a screw sticking into your tank with a wire connected to it. If stuff builds up on this screw it will not read accurately and you need to clean this crud off. The problem is that the sensor is now way up there above the water level and nothing you put in the tank will get rid of it unless you let the tank fill up high enough to reach that sensor. If you are going to be in one place for awhile you can try filling the tank to something close to the top and adding something like Rid-X to the tank. The downside is that you really need to use some other toilet facility during this time as you don't want to overfill the tank you are trying to clean. For the most part, if you just ensure that your never leave your tank open, never dump your tanks when they are fairly empty and never travel with little or no water in your tanks you should have pretty good luck with your sensors. Every now and then we add a product called Happy Camper to our holding tanks (both black and grey) to eliminate any possible lingering odors and it claims to help breakdown waste in the tanks. I don't know about the 2nd part, but I can tell you that this product makes emptying your tanks a much less "stinky" routine.

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February 19, 2008
Posted by bgkentucky

( 1 rating )

Jimlightfoot, I have to agree with BillAdams, you’re liable to get a lot of different answers to this one, ranging from using Rid-X to dumping ice cubes in your black tank while traveling. Let’s look at how the monitoring system works and reads the conditions in RV holding tanks. If you can access your holding tanks you’ll see that on the end of each tank is a series of wires. They include one single wire which is usually connected to the bottom of the tank and a harness of three or four other wires which in turn lead into a diode. The wires are hooked onto bolts or screws, which are the sensors that protrude into the tank itself. When the liquid contents of the holding tank touch both the bottom mounted single wire bolt and one of the higher mounted screws or bolts, a circuit is completed with the liquid contents of the tank acting as the conductor. This completed electrical circuit shows up as a reading on the monitor panel inside the RV. If your monitor panel is not reading correctly, either one of the signal wires is loose or damaged or more commonly a buildup of sludge or debris has covered the inner part of one or more of the bolts or sensor screws in the tank, blocking the electrical signal. I can tell you that we had the habit of draining our tanks, first the black water, then the grey water tank before we left the campground. Then after closing the termination valves to the tank we added hot water to the black water and grey water tanks, along with some Level Gauge Cleaner that we bought from Camping World. This mixture of hot water, and the Level Gauge Cleaner sloshed around while we traveled and cleaned the tank probes. Knock – on – wood, we’ve had no problems with our level sensors to date, and we can only surmise that it’s because of our constant cleaning while we travel. I hope this helps ~ Giovanni

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