How to clean an RV？ People do horrible things with the water supply at RV parks, and it’s the perfect place for moulds and mildew to begin growing. Nobody wants to be drinking that kind of stuff. There’s some over-the-counter stuff at RV dealers that they’re selling. Is it worth the investment to buy those instead? Do you recommend travelling with a full tank of water? It doesn’t have the same concentration of what we want in there, which is sodium hypochlorite. Do you have any opinions on water filters for RVs?
Yeah, absolutely. It’s important to mention that we bypassed the water filtration system for this. You don’t want to send that through your water filtration system. Absolutely, and if not done properly, it can make you sick. Sure can. So we don’t want to do that. We want to make sure you are happy, fun, and healthy out there while you’re RVing.
Sure, those tanks are pretty big. Generally speaking, they are the combined size of your black and grey tank. That’s not always true, but they are our biggest tanks. They have a lot of water and moisture and are generally warm or hot. That is the perfect place for moulds and mildew to grow. Nobody wants to be drinking that kind of stuff. So, sanitation can take care of that and knock down that mould and mildew.
How often should you sanitize your freshwater tanks?
That’s a great question. For full-timers, four times a year is the minimum. You can do it every season or every three months, but four times a year is the minimum. For everybody else, twice a year is the minimum. Even if you’re the occasional user of the freshwater tank, you want to ensure it’s sanitized well.
As quickly and easily as possible? Sure. So, sanitizing the freshwater tank is a time-consuming process. There are many steps involved. It’s not a complicated process but a very long one. Here’s how you do it very simply. We want to get a sanitizing liquid or solution inside that freshwater tank. Whether you do it with an attachment to a hose and siphon it that way, some of these rigs have their pump-driven siphon that puts it in there. Or, in fact, some newer little appliances or items where you can pour the sanitizing liquid in to get it in that tank—that’s the first step.
Once that sanitizing liquid is in there, that tank is full. Then, we use the pump on the RV to pull water from that water and sanitise liquid from that holding tank into the plumbing. The plumbing is also going to be sanitized. So, the pump is going to pull water through the plumbing system. We will go inside and open up all the taps—the shower, the sinks. If there’s an outside shower, you don’t have to do the toilet, but we want to turn all the taps on until we smell that sanitizing solution.
Then turn the pump and taps off, let it sit for a while, let it do its thing, allow it to eat away at those moulds and mildews, and do the sanitizing it intended to do. Then, we want to get rid of that sanitizing liquid and water.
So that’s in the tank, so we’re going to empty the tank. Usually, most rigs have a larger connection on the bottom with a pole, usually where, or a little switch, where that water or sanitizing liquid can come out into a bucket. You should attach a hose to get it off, into a field or elsewhere. Sometimes, some people even use the pump to put it through the grey tank and into the drain at the RV park. That’s much water, but you must think about what the part will allow you to do.
So that sanitizing liquid is out of the tank. Then, you want to do the same thing again, minus the sanitizing liquid. So you want to fill that tank up again. You want your pump to circulate fresh water through the plumbing system and the taps. You’re not smelling anything here; a little residual bleach might be left over, but we want to rinse out the tank and the plumbing. At that time, you’ll let it sit for some time, and then again, you’ll empty that water and get it out of the holding tank. Whether you want to leave the tank empty or put half a tank of water in there or a full tank, that’s up to you, but at that point, that tank and the plumbing are considered sanitized.
We’re talking about filling your water tank up. Do you recommend travelling with a full tank of water? That can be much weight, considering most freshwater tanks are anywhere from 50 to 150 gallons and eight pounds a gallon. You can quickly get into the hundreds or even over a thousand pounds of weight travelling. So, I like to travel with about a fourth of a tank in my rig. So if something happens, I’m stuck overnight somewhere, I’ve got some water for the toilet, for drinking, for doing the dishes, and things like that. But I don’t travel with a full tank.
When you’re doing your sanitation, you’ll want to ensure you’re wearing gloves, no matter what type of sanitation liquid you’re using. But especially if you’re going to use bleach, make sure you have some gloves on because you’ll be touching things, and suddenly, you’ll get white spots all over what you’re wearing. Make sure you have extra gloves around because you’ll want to change those often.
There are a couple of different types of sanitizing solutions. The most common one is bleach—plain old bleach. I like the non-concentrated bottom-of-the-shelf stuff. The concentrated one is more of a gel, and it doesn’t have the same concentration of sodium hypochlorite, which we want in there. So, concentrated does not have the adequate concentration of that chemical we sanitize with.
The other kind that you can use is vinegar. Vinegar is a good sanitiser as well. It’s not as good, so if you use vinegar, you may be sensitive to the smell of bleach. If you want to use vinegar, you’ll need twice as much as you would bleach.
Yeah, absolutely. Have them. Absolutely. I have seen—and we all have seen—people do horrible things with the water supply at RV parks: put the sewer hose up to them and spray the water right out of the spigot. I’ve seen people put sewer hoses on picnic tables and do terrible things. So, you want to think about your sanitation and safety here. A filtering system like this one is fantastic. That’s one that I’m moving to personally on my RV very soon, so I highly recommend a filtering system.
Okay, I’m sure you’re using a sanitary hose—not the one you use to flush on your black tank. So we’ve got a blue sanitary hose that we use for servicing water heaters and for freshwater sanitation. You want to make sure that everything you are doing is sanitary, so take a wipe, a sanitizing wipe, and make sure that all the fittings are wiped down adequately. Just do an extra step to keep things nice and sanitized. Everything we’re trying to do at this point, we’re trying to stay sanitary, so we go the extra effort, and I would suggest that you do that as well.
So, I do sanitation by getting the sanitizing liquid—in this case, we’re using good old Clorox here, bleach—and I like to put it in an empty and sanitized water bottle, so it’s contained. Things aren’t going to slosh out or anything like that. Then what we do is we use one of these neat little brass siphon kits here, and the water, through your blue or otherwise sanitary hose, goes in this way, and you’ve got a shorter hose going out this side into the rig. The siphon—the hose goes down in here, and the pressure of the water will suck the bleach or sanitizing liquid up into the water stream and the rig and the freshwater tank.
Yeah, that’s the method I haven’t used yet. Yeah, there are different ways you can do this. You can pour the bleach into the hose. You can use one of the bigger, traditional, more plastic siphons. But I found that this is a good solution. It does keep the mess down, especially if you’re using bleach or something like that. It does keep it contained. I need to make sure that, you know, you’re taking adequate precautions. Again, sanitize everything as you go, so you will want to wipe this down with every use. A brand new one, too.
Okay, [Applause] Don’t spill the bleach! I have countless shirts, shorts, and shoes with white spots.
So, we’ve set everything up here. We’ve got our siphon in line. Again, you don’t have to go to this extent. Some people will pour the bleach into an empty hose and then connect it to your system here. You can use one of those little inline reservoirs. There are a lot of different ways to do it. Use some of these systems, such as pumping the pump to fill the freshwater tank as well.
In this particular type, which is typical of most fifth wheels and even some coaches, they have this sort of system here with a variety of different levers that have a little illustration, and you want to make sure that you’re picking the right one.
One that power fills or fills the fresh water tank—in this case, we call it Power Fill in this particular system. So, it’s got the white sideways, blue sideways, the black sideways, the red up, and the green down. These little levers change the internal structure of this pumping system here from dry camping or city water to a winterizing system. Sanitize or do whatever you want. So we’re going to use the power to fill the tank here. You can also use the sanitizer, which would siphon things into the tank with the pump, but today, we will use the power fill. The pressure of the water will drive the sanitizing liquid in, so just the power of the water will siphon that out.
Huh, yep, creates a suction. Oh, I see it pulling it out now. Yep, thank you. You can see the bleach volume; in this case, that’s our sanitizing liquid, and it’s going down pretty quickly. So, this is being pulled or dragged by the water into the freshwater tank right now. In this case, the size of your tanks meant that we were using about 20 ounces of sanitizing liquid bleach. Two and a half cups is the correct proportion for your size. Again, the formula is one-quarter cup of bleach for every 15 gallons of capacity. If we used the vinegar, it would be one-half cup every 15 gallons.
It’s important to mention that we bypass the water filtration system for this. You don’t want to send that through your water filtration system, right? Absolutely. This siphon has taken everything out of that bottle. Now, what we’re going to do is just this. Again, you must do this, but you do whatever method you want to use to get that bleach in. I’m going to bypass the siphon. Once the sanitizing liquid is in the tank, the next important thing is to continue filling it up until it overflows. Most RVs have some overflow valve, usually underneath the rig, and we’re going to continue to fill up this fresh water tank until it starts to spurt or come out, and then we’re going to stop.
At that point, the freshwater tank is full of water and the sanitizing liquid. Yeah, the back one’s going right. We’ve got to wait for the front one. If they’re tied together, they’re filling up, probably full. Oh, I think I hear it now. Yeah, there it goes. All right, in this case, you’ve got two full tanks tied together, and water is coming out of the overflow, which is what we want.
So, we’ve turned off the water there. The next step will be to get this sanitizing liquid and water from the fresh tank into the plumbing. So, what we’re going to do is we’re going to go inside. We’ve turned the water off already. We’ll go inside and turn the pump on, and then we’ll go to all the faucets in the RV— all the sinks, the shower, and any outside shower you may have. You don’t have to do the toilet. Turn on the taps there, and you want to smell that bleach or, if you’re using vinegar, you want to smell that vinegar. Then you know that sanitizing liquid is in the plumbing itself.
Oh yeah, I can smell the bleach now. I’m in the bathroom, and I can also smell the bleach there. I will run some into the washing machine in the back sink right now. Smell it now.
So, once you smell that, you can turn those off and start the waiting game. So now that that sanitizing liquid is in the plumbing system, we want to wait. Typically, the minimum waiting is about four to six hours. I like to go personally overnight to ensure that you’re sanitizing everything that water and sanitizing liquid are touching. After that initial waiting period, you’ll come out here, open up the valves on those freshwater tanks, or freshwater tank if you have one, and dump out that water. Sometimes, on the ground, you can run a hose into a field. Sometimes, if you can catch it in a bucket and dump it somewhere, that’s good. You don’t want to make a muddy mess, and you want to be respectful of the RV park and your neighbours. But you want to get that water and sanitizing liquid out of the tank.
Once that’s done, you will do the same thing we did here, minus the bleach or the vinegar. So fill up that freshwater tank until it comes out of those overflows again. Turn off the water, go back inside the rig, turn the pump on, and circulate that water for a good minute or so through all the different taps. Again, you don’t have to go to the toilet, but through the other taps, you’re not smelling anything here; you’re just trying to rinse out that sanitizing liquid. Let it sit again for a good four hours. I like to start this process late in the afternoon, letting the sanitizing liquid sit overnight, emptying it in the morning, refilling the tank, and then sitting for four hours until lunchtime the next day. Then, empty out that tank, and you are done. That tank and plumbing have been sanitized. You can if you want to put some water in your tank for the next use. If you want to leave them dry, you can do that too. But that’s how we do a sanitizer.