Getting things dried out…

So I left off last time with a little bit of carpet pulled up, and an idea of what I was dealing with.  I needed to remove the side wall of the bed platform, which was a quick task of just removing a few screws.  After (mostly) finishing draining the tank next to all of the plumbing connections, it was light enough to pull out away from the wall.

View of the edge of the carpet with the bed platform’s fascia removed. I hate when flooring is run under walls and other permanent stuff.  All of that carpet is damp, so the tank has to come out.
It’s wet. But it’s definitely still solid, and there aren’t any signs of mold.

The carpet under the tank wasn’t too damp, but the wood under it was.  Some of that was surely the mess I made getting everything disconnected, and moving the tank with probably about 10 gallons of water still sloshing around in it.  While it was a mess, the wood was still solid, and there weren’t any signs of mold.  It was pretty clear this was a recent thing.

Slowly starting to get dried out.

It did take quite a while to get it all dried out.  There was still carpet around the pipes against the wall, and under the wall itself.  So as the floor dried, more moisture weeped out.  Ultimately, I let it go for about a week before all the signs of water were gone.

Plumbing manifold feeding water pump.

The goal of the plumbing modifications was to get things consolidated along the back wall, and get all of the valving within easy reach.  Here’s the start of that. The three valves connected to the blue piping are the supplies from each of the three fresh water tanks.  Also notice that I replaced hard (well, PEX) pipe with flexible lines.  For whatever reason I hadn’t gotten around to that on this RV–it makes a huge difference in the amount of noise the pump makes.  If you ever want to do the same thing, here’s what’s needed:

And while on the subject of other modifications that are pretty easy for anyone to do, I should probably mention the expansion tank you can see in that picture.  It’s a 2-gallon tank with a rubber bladder, with air pressure on one side and water on the other.  It also reduces pump noise, but more importantly reduces the pulsing water flow typical from RV water pumps (by absorbing pressure spikes that occur with each diaphragm cycle in the pump), and it allows the water to flow for a little bit before the pump cycles on.  A quick flush of the toilet, or even filling a glass of water can often be done without the pump needing to run, and it’ll reduce the number of times the pressure switch has to operate.  For about $40 (link here), it’s an easy and cheap upgrade.

Next time will cover a little bit of painting and starting to put things back together.

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