Our trip out west has been great so far.
Oh Cr@p, It's Leaking!
Great, that is, until we discovered our recently rehabbed wet bay had sprung a leak.
We have been staying at full-hookup parks en route, so there really wasn't much call to fill the onboard water tank. When starting out, it was only loaded with several gallons, just enough to flush the toilet and wash hands.
By the time we reached our first stop, however, the tank was all but dry. Hmmm.
After finally making camp in northeast New Mexico, several things had become apparent:
No matter how much water we put in the tank, it slowly drained down to nothing, with or without the water pump being ON.
There was no leak if the tank was empty and the shore hose was hooked up.
The newly rehabbed wet bay needed to be dismantled in order to find out just how bad the problem was.
Ugh!
Emergency wet bay repairs were in order, so we pulled it apart, removing all but one of the recently installed replacement panels, so we could figure out what was going on.
The Tinkling Tank
Once the empty tank was loaded with a few gallons of water, the problem became immediately obvious: as can be seen above, someone who will remain nameless had drilled a precise 3/32" hole through an installed replacement panel and directly into one of the new PEX lines.
As it turned out, the leak was gravity fed from the tank, and it only accelerated when the water pump was ON. That made sense because the leaking PEX section is a part of a dedicated line on the pump side of a siphon shutoff. That siphon's only function is to draw antifreeze for winterizing the NewAire water lines, but there's no check above the shutoff.
The only question now was: how to repair the leak? Our PEX tools were sitting idly at home; but it just so happened that our onboard collection of parts-you-may-never-need-but-bring-anyhow included a replacement Shark Bite shutoff. So the tinkling PEX line was cut above the leak, and the shutoff installed using a stainless hose clamp.
Another discovery is that one can only clamp PEX so tight, so a liberal dose of teflon tape was added to the barbed end of the shutoff, otherwise the repair would dribble.
The cutout section of the winterizing siphon line was set aside; we have no expectations of needing it on this trip. Complete repairs will be applied once we return home, whenever that is.
Problem fixed. Lesson learned.
Next Up
What the heck is this thing and why do we like it so much?
