Time To Go

Whenever a guest tells me that it is time to go, I always worry about having the discussion. If you own a motorhome, you know exactly what I am talking about.

Flight attendants have a similar routine, carefully explaining to their passengers how to secure themselves in a seat almost as if no one has ever used a seatbelt before. Is it really necessary to demonstrate how to operate a seat belt? Airplane seatbelts operate differently from car seatbelts. In the event of an aircraft accident, post-accident studies have shown that passengers will often try to release their seatbelt as if they were in a car, by reaching for a non-existent release button. Hence the pre-flight walkthrough.

We have to do something similar in our coach.

You can’t just go when it is time to go. You need a pre-flight walkthrough.

Why?

Because RV toilets are not like other toilets. They are different.

And, since they are RV toilets, well, they will develop issues like most other equipment in a coach. Someone told me that it is due to the MTBOSM (Mean Time Between Oh Crap Moments — or something like that). MTBOSM fully applies to the latest issue in our coach.

Yesterday, someone found that it was time to go. After the time to go had passed and went, the RV toilet would not flush.

The main difference between an RV toilet and a residential toilet is the electronic flush. There is a button that needs to be pressed to activate the flush. There is no flush handle. If the button is pressed for too long then it will change how the toilet flushes. Even finding the flush button on the panel can be challenging. The RV industry likes to create panels for operating toilets that no reasonable human being would understand without an instruction guide.

Take a look at the panel in our coach:

What on earth is up with that design?

An instruction guide? Of course.

In the Dometic operating manual, which you can download here, they do not tell you how to flush the toilet. I mean, why would you? The panel is self-explanatory.

Nonetheless, we provide an overview on how to operate the toilets in our coach any time we have a guest that needs to go. Even then, there are often issues with the process.

In this case, the toilet would not flush.

I tried to resolve the issue by pressing the flush button again. All that did was add more water to the bowl.

The problem required a different approach.

Our toilets are macerating toilets. That design is also different from a residential toilet. That design means you have to be very careful about what goes down the hatch, as it were. Even using too much toilet paper may create an issue.

The toilet would not flush yesterday because there was a clog due to the volume of toilet paper.

If you search google about how to deal with an RV toilet that will not flush, you will find a wide spectrum of potential solutions including the removal of the toilet to gain access to the macerator pump.

Fortunately, we were able to dislodge the clog — I won’t go into detail here — without removing the toilet. This restored the functionality of the toilet.

Just one of those MTBOSMs that can happen in a coach.