“Dad, there’s water on the floor!”
Nov 05 2008
“Dad, there’s water on the floor!”
That is not what a parent likes to hear at three in the morning, especially if the family is living in an RV; and, if the son is calling from the bathroom, I mean, are we talking grey or black water, and how close is it to our bedroom?
First, the water system in an RV is divided into the grey water (water from the sink and shower drains), black water (you can guess where this comes from), and the fresh water tanks (this supplies all water —drinking, washing, flushing, et cetera.).
As you see, my son’s cry carried a few unknown specifics, the worst of which was racing through my mind, though my wife shot up faster than I could to yell “what kind of water?” I guess all of her on-call nights waiting for notice of babies’ deliveries makes her better suited to wake up to nighttime alerts — that and her distaste for all sewage water issues in our RV.
What had happened that night was that the temperature was supposed to be about 15 degrees outside. We had been in RV parks in Yellowstone and Bozeman, Mo., in the same situation. The best suggestion to date had been to leave a faucet inside the RV open a little and our outside grey water tank open so the water would drain out. This setup would keep water flowing and keep the water hose that was supplying water to the RV from becoming a frozen snake (as our camp host so eloquently put it). The setup worked great.
When we got to Buffalo, I decided to do the same procedure, as opposed to unhooking the hose and redoing it in the morning. I didn’t feel like walking out in freezing temps to unhook a hose. So, I turned on the bathroom faucet a slight amount at bedtime. But, because we weren’t hooked up to a sewer drain (it was an old park and the drain was behind our RV, not near the front where the drain from the RV is), my wife asked if the tank would fill up by morning with the faucet on.
I considered that our fresh water tank was about 100 gallons, therefore, I told Mary Claire all was fine and we can go to bed. Possibly because of the late hour, my age, or a combination of both, what I hadn’t figured in my figuring was the correct tank. The water from the bathroom faucet that went into the drain went into the grey water tank — not the fresh water tank. Thus, at three in the morning, I was alerted to my mistake. The grey water tank had filled up and the water was overflowing from the shower drain onto the bathroom floor and into the hallway. Fortunately, we caught it early enough so that little water went outside the bathroom and no damage was done — other than the grey hairs on my head that resulted from the image of the black water tank overfilling (this wasn’t helped by my son’s second cry that there was something in the water).
The other fortunate thing was that the veteran RVers next to us can’t see mistakes that happen in our RV. So, with a hearty wave and a “Good Morning,” I was able to maneuver the RV over the sewage dump and drain the grey water at the first morning light.
