Quote:
Originally Posted by brooks340
While on our summer trip across Canada this year I had a frightening thing happen. We were travelling from Alberta across Canada to New Brunswick, about an 8 day trip and on our first night on the road we stopped at a great little campground in Saskatchewan. After we setup for the night, and because I was only planning on dumping the tanks every few days on the road I decided to treat the black tank. So I ran a full bowl of toilet water to add the Happy Camper treatment, waited while it dissolved a bit then flushed it down the toilet. I always also run the toilet for a couple of minuets after I add the treatment just to make sure there is enough water in the tank to start out. So while standing there flushing the toilet I decided to open the medicine cabinet DIRECTLY ABOVE THE TOILET. We have a MHC 294RL and the aft medicine cabinet is directly over the toilet. When I opened the door, much to my horror my shaving cream can fell out of the cabinet and directly down into the black tank. I've never done this before and to this day don't know why I opened the door while having the toilet open like that. Anyway, panicked I went outside and flushed the tank a couple of times, and we got the cap of the can out but not the can itself. I had visions of the can blocking the black tank, us needing to remove the tank to retrieve the can etc. I called a local mobile RV tech the next day who advised me to wait it out, in his opinion the can would eventually make it's own way out. So we carried on with the trip, spent a month on the east coast, using a septic service to clean out our tanks while there, all with no issues but no can. I even bought a scope and fished it up the discharge pipe looking for the can possibly in the pipe but no luck. Then, on our return trip while dumping the tanks one morning I heard a clunk and lo and behold the can was wedged in the clear elbow I have on my sewer hose. You can't imagine the relief when I saw that! We dogged a bullet, but I am glad I listened to the mobile tech's advice and in the end things did work themselves out.
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We had a similar experience - DW was using a hose with quick connect and a fine spray nozzle (all-brass fittings), and she was flushing through the ball valve on the commode. All of a sudden the quick connect fitting released, and the brass nozzle dropped into the tank. Well, after a lot of soul-searching, we decided to leave it there and hope it did not jam in the blade valve. Four years later, a slightly corroded brass nozzle showed up in the clear elbow ! BTW, due to never knowing if the blade valve would be jammed open, even a bit, by the errant nozzle, we immediately purchased one of the "final" knife blade valves with the male and female bayonet fittings at the outfall end of the waste line. This was to avoid those lurking surprises.
I was really amazed how much corrosion was on that "brass" nozzle - the black tank is obviously a very harsh environment, even for brass !