All right, let’s go ahead and talk about a crappy situation- the RV style toilet. First off, these are not like our home toilets that are made of porcelain. In a lot of cases these are made of plastic. So, we definitely want to make sure we’re careful when we sit on them. There’s a couple of things I want to bring up, especially to those of you looking at winterizing.
The first thing we are going to look at is the back of the toilet. In the back we have something called a vacuum breaker:
Now, the vacuum breaker does some cool stuff. For one, it doesn’t allow our black tank water to come up and mix with our fresh tank. Now, our fresh water does actually mix with black tank water, but it happens inside the vacuum breaker. Sometimes we forget about the condition of the back of the tank while we are winterizing with a food grade antifreeze or even re-flushing our lines. The vacuum breaker will hold water and if it is not winterized as well then the water will freeze, break the vacuum breaker and the next time you flush you’ll have water spraying the wall. So, while you’re running the food grade antifreeze through the toilet, you’re going to hold the pedal down until pink comes through into the bowl. Once the water is pink, you’ll close the lid.
Let’s go ahead and talk about the seal in the bottom of the bowl. When you push the pedal and open up the toilet, there is a blade, and just above it is a seal.
The way these toilets are made, there’s a small amount of water that sits on top of the blade to prevent the gases from rising from the tank. If you have a situation where that water is seeping through the seal, you’ll need to purchase a small kit, put on your gloves and replace the seal instead of replacing the entire toilet.
And there’s your Tech Tip!
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