A Nice Poop Smoothie

 When you are traveling around in a camper van/motor home, you have to think about a lot of things that you would never consider at home.

First off, your power supply. Like I learned on a cloudy smokey day in Teddy Roosevelt National Park. If you have no watts coming from your solar panels it is not a good day to use the convention oven, on inverter power.

The Solar Control No Power From The Moon Yet

Sure, it cooked my dinner, but with 0.0 amps input eventually we had a black out, and a serious issue of no water from the pump to brew koffee.

Ivanpah Concentrated Solar Plant 392 Megawatt Capacity No Lack Of Sun Here

The biggest thing you have to always thinking about in a RV is your water.  

Now you do not, well I do not want to pack around too much of it because its heavy. A gallon of water is 8 lbs. and some change, and say your internal tank is 25 gallons, and mine might be more or less, but I have never seen this internal tank even though it’s in here with me somewhere. But if it was 25 gallons and I filled it up to capacity it would weigh more than 200 lbs., and that’s 200 pounds that would be cutting into my fuel usage, which has stayed around 15 miles per gallon and as high as 17 miles per gallon.

 I manage my water  by keeping it around 25% full for the road, as water is easy to get most anywhere for free

Water Vending In The Desert

except here where you have to pay for it. But I didn't as I had water to spare at 25% capacity.

The other water you have to think about is wastewater.  You have to  contend with that by connecting your drain hose to your drain, and putting the other end into the sewer drain provided in full hook up situations. Why a lot of these connections are uphill from where you are seems to be a phenomenon that relates to the parks Wi-Fi strength at your site. 

Now camper vans have two wastewater tank. The first one is Gray Water. It drains from the sinks and has its own tank. Just like on a ship, except I don't dump it in the ocean. 

The other tank is the Black Water tank. The black water tank has nothing to do with the mercenary group Blackwater who shot 195 people and maybe made them drink black water, before they executed them  but there is no evidence of that.

Toilet From Gold Finger "Maybe"

Yes, the black water tank holds urine, and excrement, and is directly under the toilet.

I had been staying in a lot of places where the nighttime temperature were  dropping to 28 degrees or lower. 

Not wanting to deal with frozen hoses in the morning my system was when setting up for the night to fill up my internal tank to 50%, and to drain both the gray and black tanks. Now with just me the tanks only needed emptying every other day, or every three days.

This system was working really well until I was cruising down the back road, and I noticed the outside temperature was 18 degrees, and at night it was around 27.

My fresh water was fine, but I started to notice that the waste in the toilet wasn’t disappearing like it should and the paper was building up into a little mound.

Humm, I thought that can’t be good, so I found a stick and poked the poop. It was stiff and didn’t want to go down the drain.

Now I was starting out in Silver Springs Nevada and was going to take a chance on no snow and take 395 out of Reno. Then highway 70 to Portola where the Western Pacific RR museum is. Then on to 89 and down into Red Bluff where I knew it would be warm. I also knew I had to dilute the waste in my black water tank, so while I was still connected to park water, I filled that  tank about ¾ of the way full.

Fortunately, there was no snow on any of the highways, and only one section were there was just a trace of snow along the side of the road.

This kept the temperature up, and highway 36 provided an abundance of curves, that provided just the right amount of turbulence that stirred and sloshed that tank into the ultimate black water tank  superior  poop smoothie.  This highway is so twisty I can’t believe I never rode it on a motor bike.

At the park that night I connected to park water and filled up the Black Water tank to the 100% mark. I then connected my sewer hose,  and when I opened the valve,  the tank instantly relived its constipation. The only thing that would have been better would have been to drop this load at Mar-a-Lago.

Tonight, I left everything supply and drain hose connected even though the temperature is supposed to drop to 32 tonight. Will see what happens in the morning….But everything has to be empty, as tomorrow storage is the order of the day....

 

 

Ha -In The Middle. How About That!