Use your RV Water Pump when Hooked up to Water?

Ingrid FeaginRV Tech Tips

Welcome to another Todd’s Two Minute Tech Tip Tuesday, brought to you by the National RV Training Academy. The only academy that give you the credentials to become a certified RV technician and/or inspector. 

Let’s set the scene: 

Do you ever have a problem where you go to an RV park and either have too much pressure or not enough? You’ve been told to get yourself a water pressure regulator and you see that there’s two types out there. One for about $50 and one for about $12. You think “Hey, I’m going to be money conscious. I’m gonna try that $12 one.” You go ahead and hook that inline water pressure regulator up, you try to take a shower and it’s like the desert, no water coming out. 

Here’s the situation.. You know at RV parks we’re always getting problems with water coming into too much pressure, or maybe not enough pressure. What we want to stop is what’s called a water hammer by using that water pressure regulator. We want to slow the flow of that water down so you don’t bust your pipes. The problem with these inline water pressure regulators is they’re really not strong enough and can’t push the volume you need to take that shower. Well a lot of people and, I don’t understand why we do this (me being one of them), when we see we have city water hookup we just simply hook up to city water but, your RV is actually equipped with the holding tank and a water pump. Now for most of us, if we’re hooked up to city, we don’t use the water pump and here’s the problem that we have: When that water is sitting in the water pump, stagnant, it’s going to get nasty and it’s going to have to be cleaned out. The best thing we can do is exercise our water pump. Really one of the better things we can do is every time we pull up to a site, just as a suggestion, is fill up your water tank and use your water pump so you get consistent pressure from your water pump, anywhere from 45 to 55 psi. 

With that my friends, you can take a good shower. 

Watch the video for some additional tips!

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