Learned Something New

 

We have moved on to Chattanooga, Tennessee today.  I will report more on that in a later post.  For this post I wanted to give you some RV information, which I just learned, after having RV’s for 20 years. 

Since we have had the fifth wheel, we began to notice some very tiny flies appearing in the rig from time to time.  Not at all RV parks, just some.  At times we had these flies in our house and attributed it to fruit flies or drain flies.  In the RV they are a little annoying, but never in very large numbers.  Fran did some research online and found a trick of putting out some apple cider vinegar as a trap and this worked well.  At our last park in Pikeville, Tennessee their numbers were much greater, the most we had ever seen and primarily concentrated in the bathroom.  We laid our trap in the kitchen and the bathroom and were catching dozens of them.  I did some research in a couple of RV forums that I like to read and found out what may be the problem and a solution.

First you need a little a more information on they way we operate our RV waste system, based on experience and information from other RV’ers.  RV’s have two holding tanks, one for black water (toilet) and one for gray water (sink and shower).  These tanks then empty into one pipe that you then connect a hose to, which then connects to the park sewer system.  While at an RV park we were always told to leave the black tank closed and let it fill up  then you drain it.  This allows the solids to break down (sorry for being gross).  As for the gray water tanks we have always left them open to drain to the park.  With this method no gray water stays in your tanks.  Ok, with that information, here is what learned.

With the gray tanks open the flies are sewer flies and are coming from the parks sewer system, up through the hose and into the gray tank.  Now in our previous RV’s they had no where to go as all the drains had a curved drain pipe so that water blocked the pipe and nothing could enter.  Well in the fifth wheel we have a shower and it does not have a curved drain pipe.  It has a straight drain pipe right into its own holding tank.  Here is where the flies were coming in and why we had not seen this problem in other RV’s we have owned.

The solution is to keep the gray holding tanks closed until they need to be drained, then drain them and close them back up. 

Probably more than you all wanted to know, but it is Life on the
Road!