July 24, 2020 by Lee and Tracy

TSD Logistics Fuel Card

(This post was written by Lee – Trace)

This is a pretty long post about not just the discount fuel program, but also about fueling at truck stops in general. There’s lots of information for people who love the details, like me. If you don’t want all that stuff, here’s the New York City version: I’m going to tell you how to save a TON of money buying fuel for your rig. A TON. So get a cup of coffee and enjoy.

Since we recently started traveling again, after sitting for six months, we started thinking about the costs normally associated with travel, such as campground fees, and fuel. Normally diesel is more expensive than gas, sometimes by quite a bit. We’re not the only ones who worry about this. Every rig burns fuel, whether you’re in a modified matchbox van or the largest and most expensive class A bus.

Because fuel is one of the major costs in this lifestyle, we are always on the lookout for cheaper ways to fuel up when we travel. Normally this topic might be considered boring by most people, but what if I told you that you could be saving up to fifty cents per gallon, and sometimes even more, whenever you fuel up? Would that be boring?

TSD Logistics offers RVrs access to their fuel program, and the savings are pretty spectacular. Before I go any further, I want to stress that this is NOT a credit card. It is NOT a membership program. It is NOT for gas. It is for diesel fuel ONLY, so if you do not purchase diesel, then you can stop reading here. Or, you can keep going so you can tell all your diesel buying friends about it! In addition to the savings on fuel, you can get up to $200 in cash per week (just like using an ATM) but there are no fees, so it’s cheaper than using most ATMs. And a further bonus, you can also use the card to purchase DEF in truck lanes that offer it, although there will be little or no discount for the DEF. Still a nice convenience for anyone who uses the DEF pump. (And if you don’t, you should try it, it’s much better than pouring the DEF in from a box or jug).

TSD Logistics is a bulk transport freight company that has been around since 1980, so they’re firmly established and stable, and will likely be around for a long time. Their primary work is as a carrier of the tire and rubber industry’s raw materials, including silica and carbon black. They invented some of the trailers and hoppers in common use today. Headquartered in Texarkana, TX, but operating throughout the US, they are able to negotiate some pretty impressive discounts on diesel fuel. (To be clear we are in no way associated with this company and are not being directly compensated to write this post. I should probably also state here that this is based solely on our experience and opinions. We always try to give good advice, but as always your mileage may vary. – Tracy)

The discounts are then made available to anyone who wants to sign up for their fuel card, which is through the Wex EFS system.

Once you have applied for and received the card, using it is relatively simple, with a few minor caveats. I will talk about those, and go into more detail about each step, but here’s how easy it is:

Pull your rig into a truck lane at a truck or fuel stop that is part of the discount program.
Insert or swipe the card at the pump.
Answer the questions on the screen like you would at any pump.
Pump your fuel (and DEF if available and needed)
Details regarding your transaction, including the discount and fees show up in the app usually within a few minutes.
Within 2-5 business days the money is drafted from your bank account and you receive an email showing you the details of the transaction and the TSD fees.
Rinse, and repeat, and let the savings pile up!

I already mentioned this before, but it’s very important, so I will mention it again. This program is an extension of a trucking company, using their buying power to get you the “pro” price for diesel. So it’s not for gas. Diesel only. Look for green, although green doesn’t ALWAYS mean diesel. If you don’t see a sign that says DIESEL, or a diesel price, keep on going.

As I mentioned before, it’s NOT a credit card, it behaves more like a debit card. You use it instead of your debit card, but it’s connected to your checking or savings account. Then any money you spend is deducted from your checking account in a day or so, just like a debit card. (Some people open a secondary checking or savings account only for use with this program, because they are concerned about giving out their checking account information. If that’s something you want to do, you certainly can. Just be sure there are funds in any account associated with the card; they charge a $15 fee for insufficient funds.) To start with, if you want to attach this card to a separate checking or savings account, you’ll need to open one. Then you can either click HERE, or go to this address to apply for the card: https://tsdv.loadtracking.com:8443/im/fuelcardapp

“Apply” isn’t really the right word, you’re really just signing up. There’s no credit check, and I can’t think of a reason why they would reject anyone. They do ask for a social security number to protect them from people who sign up and buy fuel with an empty account. Here’s what the form you will fill out looks like:

As participants in the program, we get a small fuel credit for each person who signs up and uses the card, so if you do decide to get a card, please consider putting “Lee Perkins” in the Referred By field! Once you get the card, you can start using it immediately. (Although we are not being paid to promote this company we would receive a one-time $25 fuel credit once a new customer spends buys 100 gallons of fuel. Hopefully you know us well enough by now that we would NEVER recommend a company unless we believed in it. A little bit of free fuel is always a good thing though so we will certainly take it if you decide to use our names and use the program. If you have concerns please skip referring us, but we still recommend you try it out. There is no upfront cost, and if it doesn’t work for you we can’t think of any downsides to having the option. – Trace)

Since we started full timing, we have always preferred truck stops to gas stations, and truck lanes to car or RV lanes when we are hitched up. There are a lot of reasons for this. We got a Good Sam Pilot/Flying J credit card because that’s the brand I prefer, and we get a $0.08 discount off the cash price, which typically brings the Flying J/Pilot price down to match the rest of the chains. So I got to use the place I prefer, and not pay a premium for it. Truck stops are everywhere; they’re right at the exits, they are generally very easy to get in and out of and they generally have plenty of room to maneuver and park. Some of them are just massive places! They are designed for big rigs, all of which are bigger in every way than any RV.

Plus, fresh diesel is better than stale diesel, and these places move a LOT of fuel. There’s also no transaction limit. Lots of gas stations have $100 per card or per day limits, and large class A motorhomes can easily take that much fuel. As can many large pickups with auxiliary tanks. Most of the major chains have locations that are sized based on how busy they are, so you can see centers with 20 or more truck lanes. The pumps are also high volume, so it doesn’t take long at all to fuel, usually less than half the time of a standard pump. The caveat to that is if you have a pickup truck, make sure it has the large nozzle hole. Not all of them do. And as mentioned before, most now have DEF pumps at the truck lanes. Most larger chains have pretty well stocked convenience stores, and food options. Of course, all of these benefits usually mean the cost of fuel is a little higher, but that’s why we only use them when traveling.

The slightly higher price is worth it to us to not have to hassle with going miles away from the interstate and negotiating in and out of a tiny and possibly busy or closed gas station. And now, we can get all of those benefits AND spend less in most cases than local gas stations. We use the Gas Buddy app to find fuel prices when we’re not hitched, and many times the TSD discount price is lower than places like Wal Mart and others. When we’re hitched we use a variety of apps to find truck stops, mostly Truck Stops Pro. When we last traveled any considerable distance, a few weeks ago from San Antonio to western Minnesota, without fail the TSD discounted price at every location was lower at every major chain, and at tiny “mom and pop” type truck stops the price was the same as the cash price at those locations.

An unscientific collection of data has shown us that generally speaking, those small private truck stops are usually a little more rough around the edges, and the price is usually the same as “in town” gas stations. No frills, no extra markup on diesel. This is important to remember when I get to how TSD makes their money on your purchases. (For me this was the major downside of using the program. Flying J’s and Pilots are pretty consistent, but we were exploring new territory by using smaller truck stops. They were a real mixed bag. Some were really nice and clean and others not so great. This matters mostly for me because I try to walk the dog at every stop. I will say that some Pilots and Flying J’s are not that clean either. They are very consistent on the products they stock though. Mainly I am looking at this as a bit of an adventure and am trying to be more flexible. If you are super routine oriented around your stops this might not be the best choice for you. – Trace)

So, if you already are used to using truck lanes at truck stops, saving a bunch of money is going to be yet another benefit for you. If you haven’t done it, there’s genuinely nothing to be afraid of. You should give it a try whether you get this card or not, or while you wait for the card. Here are some basics to be aware of before you decide to give it a try. This isn’t everything, and if anyone comments things I have left out, I will update the post with them.

You are absolutely allowed to use truck lanes in a truck stop to fuel any RV or a pickup with or without a trailer hitched. These places are businesses, who want to make money, and your money is just as good as anyone else’s. Don’t be shy. Get on in there and stimulate the economy. If anyone ever tells you otherwise, smile and nod and tell them you’re on vacation from the Northern Mariana Islands. That’s a US territory, so they won’t hassle you for being a “foreigner”. If they ask why you don’t have an island tan, tell them you just got out of prison. Pull out a map and ask them for directions to the Grand Canyon. They’ll leave you alone.

The entrance is almost always separate from the car entrance. They are also usually HUGE entrances. Whenever possible, until you get the hang of them, try having your co-pilot look the location up on Google earth and spot the truck canopy. It’s usually in the back, and long and narrow. Then have them back track looking for the entrance. It’s usually like a service road, and in busier areas it can have it’s own traffic light. And usually, the car lanes and truck lanes are on opposite sides of the main building, and usually you cannot get from one to the other unless you go back out to the road and come back in. This is to keep cars from getting into the truck area.

Take your time. Go slow. Turn wide whenever you can. Pay attention to the layout and how trucks are parked and moving around. There’s almost always LOTS of space to maneuver, and if you are moving slowly you can see what others are doing and just copy them.

Don’t try to get the closest lane to the store. Usually that one is a dummy lane, and nonfunctional. When you can, take an empty lane rather than pull in behind someone. Truckers can take a long time to pull away, and backing up is tricky and dangerous. Impossible once someone pulls up behind you. Try to approach lanes as straight as you can so you don’t take up space you don’t need.

Stay put. If you have to wait in line, stay in the rig. The truck in front of you might pull forward within seconds or 15 minutes, but you don’t want to be the guy holding up the lane. Truck drivers aren’t shy about correcting your behavior.

Be prepared. Diesel is dirty disgusting filthy greasy stuff. It will be on the ground, so be careful, you don’t want to fall. It will be on the pump, the handle, the windshield cleaner, everything. Wear gloves, don’t lick anything.

Run inside. If you don’t have a card for that brand, or a fleet card (another reason to have a TSD EFS card!) you will likely have to go inside and lay down your card. Make a note of your lane number, otherwise you will have to go all the way back out to get it. And it can be a LOOOOONG walk.

Don’t wander. That fuel comes out of the pump FAST and HARD. If you wander, you will regret it. Ask me how I know. Don’t try to top off the tank, either. Ask me how I know.

Top off your DEF. I don’t care that it’s a little more money, I get DEF at the pump because it’s easier than using a box or a jug. Trust me.

Do your business and pull up. Once you’ve fueled up, cleaned you windows, checked your tire pressure (lots of truck stops have air hoses in the truck lanes!) and thrown our your trash, etc, get back in your rig and pull up; there’s often a line on the pavement showing you where to pull to. Trucks have MUCH larger tanks and take a while to fuel, so by clearing the lane, the guy behind you can do his thing while you run in to grab a snack and go to the bathroom. In most cases you will be back out before they are even done fueling. If you are doing anything else, like laundry (YES! Most truck stops have laundry facilities) or taking a shower, or having a sit down meal, whatever, then you really should go back out to your rig, park it in a parking space (if you’ve never done it before, it can be exciting to park your rig between two semi trucks, be sure and take a picture!) and go back inside. You might even decide to spend the night. It’s not as common as Wal Mart, but truck stops can be a safe and reasonable place to sleep at night. Just be sure to ask at the counter what the rules are. Some places charge a fee, some offer varying hookups, and some just want to be told that you are staying over.

Don’t weigh your rig. The one thing you don’t want to do at a truck stop is get weighed. (If you want to know how much something weighs, then weight yourself on the scale inside, although I don’t recommend that either.) RVs need to be weighed tire by tire to get any kind of accurate information, and weight and tire safety is too critical to do it badly. Don’t waste your money or the time of professionals who need to get weighed.

Some Pilot and Flying J locations (and possibly other chains, I don’t know) have “RV” lanes. These are super convenient for some folks, because they are usually off to the side of the regular car canopy, and will often have long pole windshield cleaners, dump and fresh water fill stations, and propane refilling. Lots of people LOVE these RV lanes because they offer lots of amenities for the RVer. I’ve used them, and I’m not a fan, mainly because they don’t have high volume pumps, and they ALWAYS require that you go around the car canopy and right in front of the main building to get in or out, and there’s always a ton of foot and vehicle traffic. Plus, and I can’t stress this enough, the TSD discount does NOT apply at RV lanes. TRUCK. LANES. ONLY.

Here’s how TSD makes money from this program. When you use the card, in addition to paying the discounted price for fuel, you pay 10% of the discount to TSD. In most cases, there is also a $0.65 fee that is added that is charged by the truck stop. This means that there are some cases where the card is NOT the best option, and you will need to do some quick math to determine that. If you are going to save less than $0.65 on a fill up and they charge the $0.65 fee, then you are paying more. Maybe just one penny more, but math is math.

So, to keep this super super simple:

Retail Price: $ 3.00 per gallon
Discount Price: $ 2.50 per gallon
Fee to TSD: $ 0.05 per gallon
Transaction Fee $ 0.65

Once you’ve got your shiny new EFS card, you’ll want to get the app. That’s very important, because you will want to use it to see what the prices are like, especially if you are going to be fueling near a city. TSD gets different discounts not just for each brand, but for each location, so the price can vary a LOT from truck stop to truck stop, especially around a city. On the open road it will be less so, but you still want to know what your options are. The app is not required. You will still get whatever discount is available if you use the card at a participating location, but you’re flying blind without the app and in some cases you will pay more than you need to, so I highly recommend the app.

Please be aware that while I was writing this I got an email from TSD telling about a MAJOR update coming soon to the app, so I will update this post once that happens with the new info and changes.

Right out of the gate I have to say that I am pretty unhappy with the app just as a spoiled user of technology. In this day and age it feels un-intuitive, and clunky. It works, but you will find it wanting. Download it, and to start with you will need to enter the entire ridiculously long card number. Your thumbs will get tired. Then the password. If you have the option, tell your phone you want to do the thumb scan or whatever other shortcut for logging in in the future. Sometimes when you launch the app after you’ve told it to remember all the info, the info isn’t there, and you have to close and reopen the app. And then it’s there. The first screen is just a list of your recent transactions. To see what’s available near you, you can look at the map, which will show you locations and prices within a radius that you can preset in preferences. For the purposes of this example, I am showing nearby Minneapolis:

The lowest price will always show up as a green icon, which I think is a nice feature. Other locations show the price. Locations where there is no price usually means that there is no negotiated discount. They will still take the card, but you will pay the “street” or cash price. If that’s the case, you should NOT use the card, because in addition to the street price you will pay the $0.65 transaction fee. But in this example, you can see that $1.879 is the current lowest price.

TSD negotiates a discount on the per gallon price, so if the station changes a price, the TSD price changes accordingly. If I tap on that location, I see that it’s a TA (TA is usually the best price based on current negotiations between the chains and TSD.) You can also see the address and lat/lon of the truck stop, but that’s it. (I really don’t like this. I often pick truck stops based not only on gas prices but food options. When its hot we tend to grab some fast food at these stops. If you always use your RV bathroom and RV kitchen to eat this is less of an issue. -Trace)

I don’t know why, but they choose not to include other useful stuff. Here’s a screen shot of the same truck stop in the Truck Stops Pro app. As you can see, it tells me the same info, but also tells me the distance, how many parking spaces there are, how many lanes, how many DEF lanes, LOTS of useful info. And I can click “ROUTE” and it will dump the address into my maps app to take me there. ALL of this should be in the TSD app, in my opinion.

If I then look that same location up in another app, I see that the retail price is $ 2.199. So the discount is $ 0.32 per gallon. TSD Logistics will add a fee of 10% of that, which would be $ 0.032 per gallon, so the “adjusted” price per gallon is now $ 1.919. That means to fill my 35 gallon tank will cost $ 67.16 plus the $ 0.65 transaction fee, for a total of $ 67.81 instead of $ 76.96. I saved $ 9.15 on that fill-up. I know that seems like a small amount after all the buildup, but that’s about 11% savings. Based on that if we had used that card all last year, we would have saved $600. If someone were to say, here’s $600, do you know what you would do with it? (Trace would buy presents for our grandson.) (You bet I will – Trace)

The app also allows you to do basic Point A to Point B route planning that shows truck stops along the way so you can plan to take advantage of the lowest prices.

But here’s another major failing in the app, for me. In order to do routing, you must have a city, state and zip code. That’s just stupid. So now while you’re bouncing down the road your copilot has to look up zip codes on the internet just to put in a “TO” location to get a green line to show you truck stops along the way. This NEEDS to be fixed. (Totally agree. I was using two different apps just to make this work. I would find the location on the EFS app and then look up the other info and routing. It was pretty frustrating initially, but I ultimately got the hang of it. I found it was MUCH easier if I did it way in advance so I wasn’t trying to find a place under pressure. – Trace)

As I mentioned, they are releasing a new version of the app in a few weeks, so hopefully some of this no-brainer stuff will be fixed. I will definitely be updating this post with the new information once the app is released. In the meantime, here’s the text of an email I received talking about various upgrades:

“We are releasing a beta test on our new TSD app this week. We are estimating a public release by the end of August to all iOS users, with the Android release shortly after that. It has some really great, new features including the ability to track multiple cards at one time, more details on each fueling station, the ability to send feedback to TSD on an individual station, and many more opportunities for savings. One of those opportunities will include access to new insurance options for you and your RV. Soon, you will be able to request a no-obligation quote directly from the new app and take advantage of the collective buying power of our entire group. We are also making big investments in our billing system to allow you more visibility and accessibility to your account. This will allow you to sign up for an online account where you can view all of your ACH statements, edit your bank account information, see your referral credits and monitor your account status in real time. Look for an email within the next few weeks to sign up for this exciting, new service. Simply follow the link, agree to the new terms and conditions and create an account. From there, just enter all of your information including your bank account. You will not need to re-enter your social security number or the person who referred you. We are very excited about these new features and we hope this will make your experience with our program more user friendly. We are continuing to improve our program every day and could not do this without the help of you, our loyal customers. You have been instrumental in growing our program and we cannot thank you enough for your continued support.”

So here’s some details of our recent drive from San Antonio to western Minnesota, and what we saved:

Starting out from San Antonio, Gas Buddy showed me the cheapest diesel in the area was $2.39, and the retail price at the TA was a whopping $2.75. The TSD price was only $ 2.247. A difference of $ 0.51, which gave them a “commission” of $ 0.05 per gallon, making my price $ 2.29. At 32.5 gallons I paid $ 74.42 instead of $ 89.37. That’s $ 14.30 savings after the $ 0.65 transaction fee, on a not quite full tank.

And continuing on, here are two screen shots of the “settlement statements” they send to show you what you paid.

For the stop below we paid a 10% fee of $1.54, which means our savings with the 65¢ transaction fee was $14.70.

For the stop below we paid a 10% fee of $1.16, which means our savings with the 65¢ transaction fee was $10.95.

I will continue to talk about how much we save as we travel and data piles up, but clearly this is a fantastic deal. We am doing more or less the same thing we have been doing for six years, but now we are spending less money.

There is a little bad news. As recently as March 2020 you could use the TSD card at Pilot and Flying J locations, but that is no longer the case. Customers are getting the shaft because a couple of big businesses don’t know where their money comes from. Good Sam has an exclusive discount program with Pilot/Flying J. RVers are only to receive discounts on fuel at Pilot/Flying J IF they have a Good Sam membership card. Let me say that again, Pilot/Flying J has an agreement with Good Same that ONLY Good Same card users get a discount. I do NOT agree with this practice, for one very simple reason. The marketing for the Pilot/Flying J Good Sam card touts all the savings you can get EXCLUSIVELY with the card. We have that card, and while it does give us 8¢ off the cash price at Pilot/Flying J, that price is consistently AT LEAST 10¢ higher than all other truck stops, even the ones directly next door or across the street from Pilot/Flying J. So, no, I don’t think it’s smart of them at all to lock in customers and essentially give them nothing. TSD was not aware of this until they got a call from the management at Pilot/Flying J, who put out the following statement:

“Pilot/Flying J is no longer in business with TSD Logistics (TSD). Unfortunately, it was recently brought to our attention that TSD was reselling our fuel by offering its discounts outside of the company.

We were unaware of this activity and did not agree to the resale of our fuel. Our contract was with TSD and its fleet of drivers only.

We aim to provide the best experience to all of our guests, including RV and auto travelers as well as professional drivers. We continue to offer discounts and rewards to RV customers through our partnership with Good Sam. This partnership had no influence on our decision to end our business relationship with TSD.”

From my perspective, there is now no reason whatsoever to do business with Pilot/Flying J, as they are always going to be the most expensive option. And Good Sam is unwilling to budge on their exclusive arrangement, so I am now no longer interested in doing business with them, either. Now we’re huge fans of TA, currently the leader in discounts on the TSD card. Everyone is winning but Good Sam and Pilot/Flying J.

I hope this post has been informative and helpful, and as always I am happy to answer any questions anyone has. I will also update the post as new information becomes available, and once I try out the new app. Don’t forget, if you decide to sign up we will get a little fuel credit down the road after you’ve bought 100 gallons of fuel, so consider putting Lee Perkins in the “referred by” field and then go right on out and drive around in circles for hours and hours. Here’s one more picture for you for sticking through all the way to the very end.

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You can purchase the ebook telling the story of how we became full-time RVers.
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July 19, 2020 by Lee and Tracy

First Time in Omaha, Nebraska

Although many of the museums were closed in Omaha, Lee was able to visit the Strategic Air Command Museum. It was inside a huge building with hangers and since it was a Friday morning hardly anyone was there. He’s going to do a separate post on that. (No, really, I will. I promise. – Lee) Since I had the day off I took the opportunity to get a haircut and a pedicure. Lee said he was comfortable with it because there are so few cases in Nebraska, but even I was thrilled with all the precautions they took. Everyone was masked, and at Great Clips the stylist cleaned the chair, work station, and all of her tools before I got my hair cut. It felt absolutely wonderful to do something so normal again, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

Strategic Air Command Museum

Yeah short hair!!!

We were planning on going to dinner with his friend Jane later in the evening, but since we had some time after lunch we ran downtown to see an outdoor sculpture called Pioneer Courage Park. The downtown was deserted so we had the sculptures to ourselves. The neat thing about them is they are in several places in the downtown and the overall scene is a wagon train departing for the west from Omaha, with hunters driving a herd of bison, which startles a flock of geese into flight.

The wagon train consists of four pioneer families and their covered wagons. Each wagon is 12′ high and more than 40′ long including the oxen, horses or mules. Individual people range in height from 3′ to 7 1/2′. As you approach it, it really doesn’t look like much.

But then when you get close, they are really amazing.

As you can see the wagon train sits right downtown with the skyline in the back

I loved how they artificially created the hoove marks in the ground

And the sculptures themselves were extremely well done. You can feel the oxen straining

(This guy reminds me of the young version of Ed Harris in West World. – Lee)

The cut a trench in the concrete where the wagon wheel would have been. Love these little details.

This little girl was probably my favorite

Jack thought the dog was real at first I think

There is also a Wagon Master that stands at 11′ tall and weighs approximately 2,000 pounds. The Wagon Master served as a crucial element to wagon trains, guiding their members west and looking after the families and their supplies.

The Hunter Group portrays the constant need to provide additional nourishment and supplement the families’ meals with meat.

The wagon train is at 14th & Capitol St., along a dry creek bed, and the hunter group is driving a herd of five bison, scattering from the Pioneer Courage site and headed down 15th Street, traversing sidewalks, public planters and buildings…….

Eventually the bison before stampede onto the Spirit of Nebraska’s Wilderness Park on the Southeast corner of 16th & Dodge, startling a huge flock of geese into flight. In tandem with Pioneer Courage Park, this park features over 50 Canada geese, larger than life size, weighing approximately 200 lbs. each. The geese are cast in bronze and stainless steel – bronze alluding to Nebraska’s history and stainless steel (the metal of modernity) pointing to the future. The flight of these magnificent creatures represents the flight of geese from the industrial age to the information age.

(In the photo below, you can see how the thinner end of the “pond” is level with the ground, and the land slowly slopes away to nearly 6 feet at the other end. The effect of this is that as you walk from the small end to the large end, the geese that are fully in flight get higher and higher. It’s a great optical illusion. – Lee)

I absolutely loved how the sculptors placed little fountains at the wingtips of the geese to replicate the way the water sprays when they drag along the surface as they take off and to hide the supports holding up the geese already out of the water. Genius.

There are also geese on the closes light post to the water, which draws the eye, which further draws the eye across the street to other geese on other posts, and then to the ones going into and inside the atrium. It’s excellent theater. – Lee)

The flock continues across the street….

The geese take flight in and around the intersection of 16th and Dodge Streets, and the sculpture narrative concludes with them flying into and through the First National Tower Winter Garden Atrium.

(This is definitely in my top 5 things we’ve seen hitting the road. If it hadn’t been sooooo hot I think I would have wanted to spend a lot more time really looking at these sculptures. As it is, I would like to go back again and photograph them at night. – Lee)

Yes it was dog friendly and Jack had a great time!

(Before anyone gets upset, Jack was on leash the entire time, I just cleaned the leash out of some of the pictures because they look better that way. – Lee)

After the sculpture we headed over to Jane’s house and I absolutely loved it. They are remodeling a really cool 1960’s house and it has so much potential. It also has a LARGE fenced in yard and Jack and Gilligan (their labradoodle) really enjoyed it. Gilligan wore Jack out which was really great.

We really enjoyed seeing Jane and John and their three daughters, and learning about Jane’s charity venture. She was volunteering at the school to deliver meals and wanted to make sure their minds got fed as well. Single-handledly she started a donation program where books can be picked up for kids along with the meals. 100% of the donations go to purchasing books, and she has had wonderful success with the program throughout the summer. I know many of us wish we could do more to help during these troubled times, so please check out the Westside Foundation if you are interesting in helping. There’s a lot on that site to look at, but you can click here to go straight to the donation page. On that page, the very fist selection field is “SOLICIT CODE”. Select “Brook Brigade” and 100% of the money will go to buying books for kids.

We really appreciate seeing her and the dinner, and hope we get back that way soon when we can spend a little more time, and it’s not quite as hot and the virus is gone!

Jane, CeCe, Miranda, and Lee.

Supporting our Blog

We very much appreciate your support of our blog.

You can purchase the ebook telling the story of how we became full-time RVers.
You can purchase our recipe book filled with 80 recipes we have cooked in our RV and taste tested by Lee himself. You can purchase the kindle or paperback version on Amazon or buy the Apple version on iTunes.

July 14, 2020 by Lee and Tracy

New Mod – Air Conditioner Baffle Box

Written by Lee

For those of us who aren’t fortunate enough to be somewhere with a reasonable temperature and a comfortable humidity, an AC or two (or in some cases even three!) are a blessing. I know that for me they are an absolute requirement. They are also NOISY. I love the fact that the one in our bedroom is loud, because it makes excellent white noise which helps both of us sleep. In our rig, the bedroom is in the back and the AC is only 44″ from the bed, and when we run it with the AC blower set to “high”, which is always, the dB level is a whopping 68 dB. For reference, that’s about the equivalent of a food mixer. By comparison, when it’s NOT running, the room measures around 35, which is the same as a quiet library.

Our other AC is in the kitchen, but all the way at the end, so it’s right next to the living room. That puts it just a little off to the side of the chair I sit in to watch TV and movies, and it’s also pretty loud. It’s much higher, at 98″, and it measures at 68 dB as well. With the temperatures being 100° more or less every day in the San Antonio area for the the past month or so, I decided to do some poking around to see what I could do to help reduce the noise.

There are a variety of things that can contribute to why an AC is louder than it needs to be. Here are some things to check first:

Is it loose?
If the AC is not secured well, it can vibrate, and that can really make the noise louder. Check the mounting bolts to make sure they’re tight.

Are the seals/gaskets bad?
If it’s a much older unit, the rubber seal between your rig and the AC might be bad, and the rubber could have hardened, again causing vibration.

Is the fan out-of-balance?
An out-of-balance fan can make a ton of noise.

Is the airflow restricted?
Take off the inside cover and filter and look around inside the chamber. Anything that is in the way of the air flow can add noise as the air rushes past it. Try using zip ties to bundle wires together and secure them off to the side away from the air flow. You can also use furnace tape to secure anything and create a smooth surface for air to flow over.

If you’ve done all the inspecting and everything you can to make sure that it’s not making more noise than it’s supposed to, and you still want to it to be quieter, you can either buy an AC “silencer kit” or make one yourself. I took a look at the pre-made kit and decided that it was way too much money for a big piece of plastic, and decided to try making my own. For those with money to burn, who don’t want to, or can’t make one, here’s a link to the manufacturer:

Dometic or GE RV A/C Silencer DA100

Before we go any further, I want to point out that both the commercial product above, and my version are designed to work with AC units that have the “standard” interior ceiling cover that consists of a grill that has holes or slots for air intake, and in some cases a “dump” valve. A dump valve allows you to “dump” all of the cold air directly from the AC unit straight down and out into the room, as opposed to directing that cold air throughout your rig via ductwork. I also want to mention that the “Wacko Products” version removes the option of using the dump valve, but my mod does not. You can still use the dump valve with my version.

The commercial version essentially works by offsetting the air intake to the side by about 50%, reducing the open area, and adding some noise dampening material. It seems to look pretty nice and there are plenty of people out there who have made videos and reviewed it. I have not owned one or tested it, so I cannot endorse it. You should thoroughly research it before you spend the money. Do some Google searches and watch some videos and definitely read reviews. It’s a pretty good chunk of money to spend to not be happy with the end result.

(We started with the idea of buying one and when Lee showed me the video I personally didn’t think the noise reduction in the video was worth $189. Of course I don’t sit in that particular seat and the AC noise is much less of a problem where I do sit. If Lee really wanted it of course we would have tried it, but I love when he puts his MacGyver skills in action. – Trace)

If you’re comfortable tinkering and want to try making one of your own, here’s my frugal version. It really not at all complicated, and also relatively inexpensive.

Here’s a material list. I measured the interior AC cover and added an inch or so on each side for the dimensions.

$ 14.88 – 8′ primed 1″x 4″
$ 9.41 – 2′ x 4′ luan
$ 21.56 – 4′ x 8′ white polywall panel (in the paneling section, and matches most ceilings in rigs. It’s the most expensive part of the project, so you could just use the luan and paint or stain it)
$ 4.69 – 2 2″ hinges
$ 1.79 – magnetic catch
$ 7.88 – furnace tape
$ 8.98 – white gorilla tape (if you don’t have gaff tape. Why don’t you have gaff tape? I have been telling you to get some for years.)
$ 13.56 – 1″ x 1″ poly outside corner molding
$ 11.94 – 4′ x 8′ x 1/2″ foam insulation board (I used some leftover carpet padding, you can use almost any sound dampening material)

If you don’t have any of the materials, and you have to buy everything it will cost $95. If you want to be more frugal, you can skip the metal tape/gorilla tape and use duct tape. You can also skip the poly wall sheet and use some old rolled up t-shirts or other fabric as the sound insulation. Those changes will lower the cost to less than $50.

I chose these materials after making a “proof of concept version” with what was lying around, and decided that instead of something that would need to be stained or painted and color match I would just go with white and hope that it would blend in.

(The “proof of concept” was heavy, clunky and pretty ugly. As much as I appreciated the initiative, I really didn’t like the way it looked. Lee quickly reassured me that the final version would be lighter and prettier which it was. – Trace)

The construction is very simple, it’s just three sides of the 1″ x 4″ assembled with finish nails and then I added a 1″ x 1 1/2″ piece which as you can see leaves an opening for air to enter.

Then I attached the sheet of luan, added the layer of textured plastic sheeting and miter cut the corner trim.

I flipped it over and added three layers of 1/2″ carpet padding. The white area you see at the bottom is the white Gaff tape. I wanted to use that instead of the metal furnace tape at the entrance because I wanted to see if the rough texture of the gaff will “catch” any airborne particles before they hit the grill and filter. I thought maybe the smoother furnace tape wouldn’t catch them. I don’t think it matters what you use, as long as it holds the material in place. You could also use pretty much any sound dampening material inside. I used carpet padding because I already had it, but you could use foam, towels, blankets, insulation, anything that will absorb and dampen sound. You can also see the metal magnetic catch in the lower right corner.

Once it was all set I added the hinges.

Then I hung it up. Most rigs will have some wood framing around the AC hole in the ceiling, but check to be sure, otherwise the screws will just fall out of the thin paneling of the ceiling. Also be sure to avoid hitting any wiring with the screws. Use the shortest screws you can, and make sure you’re going into wood and that will keep you out of trouble with the wiring.

Finally it was just a matter of attaching the metal plate to the ceiling for the magnetic catch, and swinging the box up on the hinges and letting the magnet hold it in place.

See pretty 🙂 – Trace

Although we drove 1200 miles with this in place, the magnet never pulled away from the metal plate. But even if it had, it would just swing harmlessly down. When it’s “closed” the bottom of the box is 92″ from the floor, which is plenty of clearance. In our rig, when it’s “open” it’s still 75″ from the ground. And because it can be opened, the “dump” valve is still available to us, which is nice.

Lee grabbed me last minute to do the demo. I am a bit of a mess 🙂 – Trace

After installation, it was time to check the sound level! From the same position as before, with all other factors being equal, the meter gave us a reading of 62 dB, for a net reduction of 6 dB!!! This might not seem like a lot, but it is a massive amount. The decibel scale is logarithmic, not linear. This simply means that for every 3 decibels you move up or down the scale from 0-194, you are adding or dropping 50% of your remaining sound pressure levels to your exposure. By dropping 6 decibels, for instance, you first move 3 dB, and then another 3 dB. For each 3 dB you drop, your sound pressure levels will drop another 50% of the remaining sound pressure. The following table will help illustrate the order of magnitude associated with dB:

dB-Drop Survival Rate

1 dB Drop 79% of your noise has survived
3 dB-Drop 50% of your noise has survived
6 dB-Drop 25% of your noise has survived
9 dB-Drop 12.5% of your noise has survived
10 dB-Drop 10% of your noise has survived
20 dB-Drop 1% of your noise has survived
30 dB-Drop .01% of your noise has survived

So for our purposes here, we reduced the sound level 75%! That is a significant amount of improvement, especially considering I spent about two hours and $ 100 on it, and now I can watch TV without sitting in a pool of my own sweat and turning up the volume to absurd levels.

(For those non-techy, non-math geeks like me, essentially it was quieter when you stood directly beneath it. In other areas of the room, it didn’t seem to make a huge difference but directly underneath absolutely. Since the chair is almost directly underneath it, it will certainly make Lee’s life more pleasant. From my perspective it was relatively cheap, Lee had lots of fun making it, and it looks like it came with the RV. Those are my criteria for a good RV Mod! -Trace)

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July 12, 2020 by Lee and Tracy

Traveling in a COVID World

Because of COVID we stayed in Texas for six months and we were both incredibly grateful to our friends Cori and Greg for providing us a safe haven. We were both ready to start traveling again, and unfortunately COVID cases have surged and we were both nervous about traveling. Lee got a summer gig, so we needed to travel from Texas to Minnesota with a quick stop in Omaha so we could see a friend.

Neither one of us was quite sure how it would go but the only way to find out is to do it, so we set out on Tuesday and headed north. This is an account of that experience and please keep in mind your opinion on traveling right now could certainly vary. For a different perspective, please check out our friends Deb and Steve’s blog.

On our first travel day we hoped to get near Forth Worth, and we were pleased that we made our goal. Since it was incredibly hot, we really needed full hookups and 50 amp power, so we ended up stopping at the KOA Sanger-Denton which was close to the highway. I called ahead to make sure they had a spot and paid over the phone. Because we arrived before 5pm Lee had to go into the office to get the paperwork and he donned a mask prior to entering.

When Lee walked in the office no one had a mask, and he was checked in by Cecil, who was an older work kamper in his 60s. Cecil informed Lee that he did not need to wear his mask because Cecil had had pneumonia in 2014 so he had the antibodies to protect him against COVID. He then told Lee that if Lee got a pneumonia shot then he would be immune to COVID. Lee wisely said nothing but got out of the office as quickly as possible. On the plus side the sites were long and level although we chose a gravel site because it was $10 cheaper. The site still cost $40, but we definitely needed 50 amp. It was 94 degrees and the site had no shade so it took a few hours to cool down the rig.

The next day we looked forward to finally getting out of Texas (it’s a BIG state) and left with the goal of making it to Wichita. Lee was trying out a new TSD Logistics gas card program (future post dedicated to this), so we avoided our usual Pilot and Flying J truck stops, which is our go-to, and tried out other truck stops. Our first stop was a TA in Oklahoma City and when I went inside not one person was wearing a mask. They only had an Iron Skillet for food, but they were short staffed and the takeout took over 20 minutes.

Our original plan was to eat in our rig as we traveled, but with temperatures in the high 90s it would be too hot so we did takeout instead and ate in the cab of the truck. The food was good, but I was absolutely uncomfortable waiting for it as many of the patrons were giving me looks as they sat at the tables and ate. (It’s a little surreal to be the only person wearing a mask and getting dirty looks. I can see how someone would choose not to wear one, but I can’t understand why anything would think that someone else wearing one would be a problem. But, people are awful, so there’s that. – Lee)

We finally made it to Wichita and stopped at Air Capital RV park . Once again 50 amp came at a premium as these sites were $60 (minus $5.90 for Good Sam discount) for a pull through. Despite the prices and utilitarian nature of the park it was almost full, so we were glad we got a spot. Once again Lee went inside to pay and although there was a sign on door stating masks were mandatory, none of the employees were wearing one. At least Lee didn’t get a lecture this time, but once again he got out of the small office as quickly as possible.

These sites were incredibly hot and temperatures in the rig were 95 degrees. Despite the 50 amp it took hours to cool down and the poor puppy was cooped up because it was too hot to walk him for long. They did have a nice long pet area along a fence, but shade was minimal and the heat was extreme. The best part was a KFC was within walking distance, so once the sun was partially down I walked up and got myself some chicken. That was excellent!

We went to bed pretty early trying to get an early start, but around 4am the dog started barking. This is incredibly rare and we woke up a little disoriented with the dog barking and the rig shaking. My mind registered it was Kansas and the possibility of tornadoes, but I was so tired I just went back to sleep. Lee got up with Jack and he went outside to put down the stabilizer jacks and because the temperature had dropped around 30° he decided to take Jack for a walk and they had an awesome time running around outside with huge wind gusts and cooler temperatures. Jack is a great traveler but he wasn’t getting his usual exercise so that was really great.

When I got up it was raining and there was some lightning but no more heavy winds. We left and were both really grateful for the cooler temps. That gave us more options which was a good thing, because our next stop was a truck stop on the turnpike in Emporia Kansas. Despite the sign stating everyone had to wear masks per the governor, 50% of the patrons didn’t have them and many of the employees were missing them or had them pulled down. The rig was cooler though so we could use our own bathroom and eat leftover chicken in the RV at lunchtime.

Finally we made it to Omaha and since we were staying two days we decided to try a county park. They had 50 sites for $16 each with first come first serve spots. Since it was relatively early in the day we thought we might get lucky. Unfortunately, they only had two openings and two people were already in line so I called the KOA. It was $62 a night but more importantly they only had one night open. We could drive to other first come first serve county parks, or try the walk-ins at the Eugene T. Mahoney State Park. They were booked for reservations but had lots of walk ins so we decided to give that a try. It was getting later which was pretty stressful but thankfully they had lots of openings. Plus every single person was properly masked in the office and the 50 amp electric sites were only $30 per night. We did have to pay an additional $8 per day out of state visitor fee but $38 was a bargain at that point.

The campground was an older one with mature trees and beautifully kept sites. The only downside was the roads were a little tight for our big fifth wheel, but Lee was careful and managed. We stopped and took on fresh water at the dump station near the entrance and then navigated the tight turns to site 93. It was a beautiful long site, but Lee simply could not back into it. Thankfully site 91 right next to it was open and Lee threaded the needle on the first try. The site has lots of shade, beautiful mature trees, and is super deep. Absolutely lovely and the RV cooled down in no time with the shade. The puppy was in heaven with real grass and happily scampered around on our many walks. Since it is a shaded park I could walk him all times of the day and he was very happy.

Fantastic deep site

They had a pond with paddle boats for rent

Loved the huge , mature trees

Jack was loving it

Next up I will talk about exploring Omaha. Almost everything we were interested in was closed, but there were a couple of things that were open and we made the most of them!

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You can purchase the ebook telling the story of how we became full-time RVers.
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July 5, 2020 by Lee and Tracy

Plans Change, Change Again, And Reader Question

Hitch itch is definitely a real thing. It’s that feeling us travelers get when we are stuck in one place for too long. But in today’s environment it feels selfish, if not outright dangerous, not to think carefully before we change locations. Initially our plans were to head to Charleston for our grandson’s birthday party, but unfortunately South Carolina is in a full Covid tailspin right now, and both of his parents work in the restaurant industry. Then we talked about going to see our daughter in Minneapolis and even scored a hard to get site at a nearby campground. Unfortunately despite more rigorous restrictions there the kids both work in restaurants as well and again after long discussions with them they felt it was too dangerous.

That left us unsure what to do. We could stay in Texas, but as temperatures are 106 well before noon at this writing, we really wanted to find a place somewhere north. After much discussion, we thought Lee could look for a seasonal job which would provide us a place to stay and a new area to explore. We have never looked for a job mid season and weren’t exactly sure what we would find. Thankfully there are always opportunities, and within five hours Lee had found a job, had the interview, and was made an offer. We are both excited because the job does not involve working with the general public and is in a small town in Minnesota. It is three hours away from my daughter so if things do calm down we will be able to see them.

I was worried about what opportunities we would have given the state of things, but am pleased to report there are always jobs out there. This one even pays well, and has the opportunity for overtime. Perfect really for what we need. Which leads me to answering a question that a reader asked. We love answering reader questions by the way, and you can feel free to email us at camperchronicles@gmail.com anytime. Here’s the question:

If you two were starting now or for anyone who is starting in 2021 based off the knowledge you have:

Would it be better to wait? Personally I would wait. There is a ton of change associated with the first six months of the lifestyle and I don’t think I would want to throw a COVID world into that. I tend to be risk averse though. I imagine Lee feels differently – Trace.

I think it depends on your primary motivation; in general I don’t think other people are the best barometer of what makes ME happy. But if it were me, I don’t think I would wait. I think the virus is coloring things a little, so if you want to wait a few months and see if things get better, then do that. – Lee

Would it scare you too much? Absolutely. It was a huge leap for me. Again I am sure Lee feels differently. – Trace

Nope. I tend to figure out the things that I am worried/scared about and then address them. If I can’t address them, then I try to minimize them. I am extremely risk averse, as well, but I also know that nothing ever happens without eventually taking that first leap. – Lee

Are jobs still there and are they just as good today? Thankfully yes. I actually think they are better. As the baby boomers get older many are leaving the lifestyle which opens up more job opportunities. The pay is better and the environment is changing for the better imho. – Trace

There are ALWAYS jobs. Every day I get 5-10 emails from Work Kamper News from places that have immediate openings. Someone either never showed up, or they came and left. There are more camphosting jobs than anything else, but the other stuff is out there. – Lee

“Anything” you and Lee can offer I would value. I would never want to discourage anyone from the lifestyle, but timing does matter. If you are in a situation to hold tight until there is a vaccine that would be my choice. The other situattion that would have worked for me was if I was going into a long term work kamping situation. That would give you time to settle into living in an RV and keep you in one location for awhile. – Trace

Hoo boy, “anything” is a big word, and the spaces between the letters are infinite. If I could go back to me in 2014 I would tell myself a few things: don’t skip over something because you might get to it later. That usually doesn’t happen. So take every opportunity. I would also tell myself to try and leave as much baggage behind as I could, and get rid of as much I could as I went along. Wherever you go, there you are. – Lee

Hope this helps and take care.

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You can purchase the ebook telling the story of how we became full-time RVers.
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July 3, 2020 by Lee and Tracy

June 2020 Budget

The only good thing that has come out of Covid is Lee and I have been able to save some money. After several months we have managed to put $9,000 in savings and still buy gifts for lots of people we love. We are finally starting to travel in July, and things will change, but we will have some additional income to offset those costs. More on that in a post in the near future. As always for more details see below.

Clothing – Lee bought a new pair of shoes and I bought some pajamas. My old ones were six years old and literally falling apart 🙂

Dining Out – It’s nice to be in budget in this category. It’s all pizza, fast food etc. It’s one of the few ways we can treat ourselves.

Entertainment – Books, books, and more books!

Gifts – We bought presents for so many people this month and donated to the Center for Policing Equity through a program at my work where they matched the donation 100%.

Home Repair – Unfortunately we had to buy a new ice machine. The last one only lasted 6 months which really bummed us out. On the other hand, it runs nonstop from when we wake up to when we go to bed. An ice machine is just not something we are willing to do without though.

Truck Fuel – Love love seeing these low costs.

So that was the month. Lots happening soon will see how that goes.

Supporting our Blog

We very much appreciate your support of our blog.

You can purchase the ebook telling the story of how we became full-time RVers.
You can purchase our recipe book filled with 80 recipes we have cooked in our RV and taste tested by Lee himself. You can purchase the kindle or paperback version on Amazon or buy the Apple version on iTunes.

June 28, 2020 by Lee and Tracy

Class of 2014 Update

Since I had some time on my hands, I thought I would take a few moments and give some updates on the RV Dreams Class of 2014. As many of you know we started this journey by attending an RV-Dreams rally back in the spring of 2014. While we were there we made friends with a large group of people who were all planning on going on the road that year. Although I have lost track of some of them, I wanted to take a moment and provide updates to show that this lifestyle really varies wildly for everyone in it. I do see some patterns so it seemed fitting to take some time to commemorate six years from the event.

It is important to note that there were two rallies that year and many people went on the road that I either met later or never met at all. As able I will talk about those folks as well, because their journeys often intersected ours and again they help show the trends and variation.

Front row from Left: Ben, Jo, Eileen, me, Cori, Deb, Sue, Eileen,and Guy. Back row from left: Craig, Lee, Gene, Steve, Greg, Linda, Scott, Kelly, Bill, Pam, Red, Jo, and Mario.

First and foremost I should mention that after 12 years on the road Howard and Linda from RV-Dreams have finally settled into a home. They downsized to a Class C and traveled in it for awhile and ultimately ended up in the Villages in Florida. They still are having rallies (COVID has slowed that down) and provide mentorship to couples. Linda has started her own business and Howard just got his real estate license so they are definitely keeping busy.

Another couple who has had a significant impact on us is Bill and Nancy. We met them at the first rally and several times since, and they have been extremely supportive to us over the years. They downsized their Class A into a smaller model and are also living in Florida. I know they are staying busy, because I have rarely met people with more energy and we are very happy for them.

But onto our group, and these are listed in no particular order.

Lee and Tracy – We are still in our original fifth wheel, and although occasionally we talk about changing out we have so many upgrades in this one it doesn’t make a ton of sense for us. We had our first grand baby this year and have talked about buying a piece of property, but again the location is an issue. We have three kids in three states and our parents are in two others. Having the ability to travel actually works best for us with family time. We have talked about stopping, well I have, but Lee like Deb could do this forever. We worked multiple seasonal jobs on the road, but recently I started a corporate job again and we are going to see what traveling with the new job looks like.

Cori and Greg – We bonded over Cori and I working on the road and we were super sad when they finally sold their Class A. It was a second home to us and we had many wonderful gatherings in it. They downsized to a Chinook and have traveled successfully in a much smaller space and have bought a piece of property that Greg refers to as the Center for Mental Wellness in Texas near Cori’s dad. Cori has worked part-time for her employer this entire time and Greg has been running a very successful solar business.

Kelly and Bill – They like us are first time grandparents this year and once again our lives are following strikingly similar paths. They are one of the few couples that are still in their original rig and they seem completely happy with their choice. Although having conversations around buying a piece of property they have not decided on where, although location of their grand daughter is definitely a factor. Bill is installing solar for Greg which allows them to travel and generate income.

Steve and Deb – Steve has kept his corporate job this entire time and has managed to work and travel very successfully. Most of the credit goes to Deb who plans all of their routes. They have definitely logged the most miles of all the couples, although with a brand new grandson and kids getting married they are staying mainly on the west coast this year. They are also still in their original rig and again seem very happy with their choice.

Jo and Ben – Traveling nurses they worked for several years in various states and eventually sold their RV and moved back to Colorado. That wasn’t a perfect fit though so they bought another RV and started talking about going back out on the road at least part time. They have also talked about buying a piece of property, but location has not been finalized yet. When you have the whole country to choose from and family members spread out picking one place is not always an easy choice as many of us have discovered!

Ellen and Mario – Ellen and Mario sold their house and went on the road and then left the road when they found their dream house in Florida. They bought another RV and part time now and Ellen has worked on and off corporate jobs through the years.

Eileen and Gene – They sold their Class A and then bought another one, but ultimately settled in Florida to take care of Gene’s mom. Rose is in her 90’s and going strong but Gene as the only child wanted to be closer to her.

Sue and Guy – They sold their Class A and bought a toy hauler and have been traveling full time with some stops for health issues. The last two seasons they tried work-kamping and really liked it and are traveling as we speak. They bought a piece of property in Georgia near their kids pretty early on but as of yet are still living in their RV.

Jo and Craig – They switched from a fifth wheel to a Class A and although I have largely lost track of them last I heard they are traveling between PA and Texas. They have a pretty regular route as far as I know and are still living full time in their RV.

Pam and Red – They changed from a fifth wheel to a toy hauler pretty early on and have had a piece of property in Arkansas from the beginning. They have made lots of improvement to it over the years and spend time in the summer leading RV caravan trips which they love.

Linda and Scott – I know the least about what they are doing other than the fact that they switched from a fifth wheel to a Class A and spent several years working in Texas.

That covers the folks in the pictures but here are updates on others we have met along the way.

Sharon and David – They changed fifth wheels pretty early on and are currently taking a travel break while they take care of Dave’s mom who broke her hip. They like to stay close to her because of health reasons, and have worked a variety of seasonal jobs

Jim and Diana – They kept their RV the entire time, but have recently bought property in Michigan. They love to winter in Florida and have worked a variety of seasonal jobs and volunteer jobs to supplement income throughout the years.

Jim and Barb – They downsized their RV into a truck camper and have bought a piece of property in the Dakotas. They were the first of the group to build a Barndominium and inspired many others to do something similar.

Linda and Steve – They get the most adventuresome award as they sold their Class A, moved to Europe, and are traveling in a Class B. They stayed in France through Covid but have just started traveling again. Very cool.

Dino and Lisa – They changed RV’s, got off the road awhile, came back on the road, and are buying a piece of land. They are working a variety of seasonal jobs along the way to supplement their income.

Rick – Rick has soloed with his dog Maxine for several years. He upgraded to a new to him Class A and had worked several volunteer jobs throughout the country.

Bridget and Pat – We all met at the RV-Dreams rally and for several years they talked about full timing. They were taking care of elderly parents, but very recently they put their house up for sale and have gone on the road. They are a wonderful example of it not really mattering how long it takes for you to get out there. Sometimes things just take a little longer!

That is the updates and again I think the most important thing is this clearly shows there is no one true way to full time. I think we have all learned that it is a set of decisions that create a path just like any other life. One of the beauties though is there are many more decisions because of the freedom the lifestyle allows. Sometimes though it can definitely feel like too many choices and of course other factors in life often prescribe our choices. We’ve been blessed to stay in touch with most of these folks over the years and I wanted to end by sharing a few pictures of those large group meetings. We’ve had tons of smaller gatherings of course but its really special when a big group of us can get together.

Puppy gatherings are super fun too!

Supporting our Blog

We very much appreciate your support of our blog.

You can purchase the ebook telling the story of how we became full-time RVers.
You can purchase our recipe book filled with 80 recipes we have cooked in our RV and taste tested by Lee himself. You can purchase the kindle or paperback version on Amazon or buy the Apple version on iTunes.

June 24, 2020 by Lee and Tracy

Holding Tank Treatments

This post was written by Lee who as you can see is extremely passionate about tank management.

This is a followup to my post a few days ago about not leaving your gray tank open when hooked up to a sewer connection. Today I am going to save you money and time talking about “treatments” for your tanks. Before I begin, let me say that what follows is my opinion (except science, which isn’t an opinion) and your mileage may vary. If you have a way you do things, and don’t want to change, by all means, keep doing what you’re doing! I am not interested in changing hearts and minds. If you’ve been RVing for a while then you already know this, and if you’re new then this will hopefully be useful and helpful information.

This is probably going to be a very unpopular opinion based on that fact that I’ve certainly been treated to lots of very strong feelings about this topic. Some of which defy all logic, learning and attempts to prove them! Here’s what my Mom would have referred to as the “Reader’s Digest” version for those who want to cut to the chase: There is no product that you can add to your tanks that will do anything at all to reduce or eliminate odors or reduce or eliminate poo or paper.

For those interested in the longer format, read on!

There’s nothing you can add to the tank that will do anything because, really, science just does’t work that way. Except in a very few rare cases, or in very large quantities, anything you buy and put in either your black or gray tank is a waste of time and money. You are literally flushing money down the drain.

The number one clue that this is the case is that all of the methods and products are sold for use in both black and gray tanks to “break down” solids, control odors, and “lubricate” valves. Take a moment to think about that. The contents of black and gray tanks are not even remotely the same, so the idea that a few ounces of anything will do all of those things is absurd. The first thing to consider is that whatever you are putting in there is going to be seriously diluted. Let’s take a look at some examples, do some math, and compare the claims to reality! Science is fun! Sorry he gets like this sometimes. It’s generally worth hearing him out though. – Trace

Right off the bat, I am going to debunk the much beloved GEO method. This is essentially using Calgon, water, bleach, and laundry detergent to clean your tank – Trace. Since the mid 80’s people have been swearing by this method, which was apparently “invented” by someone who uses their RV “at least one weekend” per month, and based on that says that his RV bathroom gets “heavy use”. You haven’t seen “heavy use” of an RV toilet until you live in an RV full time and are prepping for a colonoscopy- Trace.

The method claims that you can keep your tank clean and control odors. Nonsense. There is no such thing as a clean black tank which has ever been used. It describes the result as a tank that is “clean, sanitized and disinfected”. I think that’s a pretty wildly irresponsible claim. I personally guarantee you that there is no way pouring anything down a toilet will result in the tank being “sanitized and disinfected”. I am willing to bet that the guy who invented the GEO method would be unwilling to drink clean water run through his own “sanitized and disinfected” tank.

Anyways, here’s how you are supposed to invoke this sorcery. First, you empty your tanks. Then dissolve 2 cups of Calgon water softener into a gallon of warm water and pour it down the toilet. Pour 1 cup of laundry detergent (or dish soap) down the toilet to clean the tank. Then you are also supposed to add half a gallon of bleach when the tank is about half full to “deodorize, sanitize and disinfect them”. There is no mention of adjusting these quantities for the size of the tank. Apparently this magical elixir is able to adjust it’s properties to fit the tank size!

Which brings me to the theory where you can adjust the ingredients and the amounts and still get the same result. That’s ridiculous. Imagine changing a cake recipe by tripling the amount of flour, adding 4 cups of vodka, and 14 eggs, and expecting to get anything resembling a cake at the end. The fact that the ingredients and quantities vary is a pretty good indicator that this is made-up nonsense. But even if you pick one “official” list of ingredients and quantities, then you will still get the same result; a black tank full of poo and pee and paper with trace amounts of soap, salt and bleach. Calgon is nothing more than water softener. It’s active ingredient has no beneficial chemical reaction with anything that is likely to be found in black or gray water. In addition, that level of dilution (two cups in 50 gallons) renders it nearly inert.

The theory behind using it is that the water softener makes the inside of the tank slippery so things won’t stick to it. Utter garbage. In order for that to be the case you would need to coat the interior of the tank. Pouring a gallon of solution into it just isn’t going to do that. Instead you will have a gallon of solution in the tank and when you add other things to the tank, it’s just going to mix together and dilute.

The next ingredient in the GEO method is 1 cup of soap. Laundry or dish soap. Again, what does it tell you that you can use either of those things? How about shampoo? Dog shampoo? Dry shampoo? Dandruff shampoo for sensitive skin? An equivalent amount of soap shavings from a bar of soap?

It is possible that the soap will help in breaking up grease in a gray tank, but that’s really only if there is agitation. If you’re not in motion, that’s not going to happen. Furthermore, almost all manufacturers of all soap recommend a 1% solution for best results. For a 50 gallon tank this would be a half gallon, or 8 cups. Using just 1 cup is going to be a severely diluted solution. The next time you wash dishes, try doing it with just a few drops of soap and see what results you get.

I don’t even know what to say about the bleach. , apart from most people think of bleach as “strong stuff” so maybe it’s just in there to make us think we’re really bringing out the “big guns”. I’m not saying to be reckless with bleach, it can be dangerous, but again, science is here to help. To use bleach as a disinfectant, you need one cup per gallon. So again, a 50 gallon tank would need 50 cups, or just over 3 gallons. And of course, all of these ingredients are only active for a very short time. Most black tanks get filled about every 10 days, and these ingredients would be inert within 3-5 days.

I would also like to point out that there is nothing in the GEO method that “lubricates”. I’ve heard people say that the soap does the trick, but when was the last time you heard of someone recommending using soap as a lubricant? I don’t want to get too personal here but there is a reason smart people don’t use soap as a sexual lubricant. If you ever tried you know it is not very effective. – Trace

Soap breaks up oil, it’s not a substitute for it. Dish detergent might make a finger slippery for a few minutes to get a tight ring off, but it’s not a method to lubricate a mechanical device such as a gate valve. And if you think that any of this stuff makes the inside of the tank itself more slippery, and allows more stuff to drain out, that’s not how fluid dynamics works. In order for that to work, you would need to coat the inside of the tank just like greasing a cake pan before using it. The lubricant wills only going to work where it is applied to the material, and that material would have to be clean and dry.

The inside of your tanks have not been clean or dry since the first time you used them. Also, the tank is made of a plastic that’s pretty well hydrophobic, so not much sticks to it. Mostly what’s in a tank that smells bad isn’t sticking so much as floating or sitting under the water, and most of it goes away when you empty the tank.

But what about all of the other products available that are specifically formulated to do all these things, using “chemistry” to somehow magically convert solid and liquid human waste and paper in the case of black tanks, and oil, hair and food particles in the case of a gray tanks?

Bunk.

Every product available commercially is made up of more or less the same stuff. It’s all varieties of soaps and salts and perfumes. None of it can work magic. There is no science that supports the claims they make, and the same principles of what I described with the GEO method go for other chemicals and substances. Just because a word is hard to pronounce, or we don’t know what it means, doesn’t mean it isn’t bound by the laws of physics and chemistry.

There are very few things that can actually be used to treat black water, but they require time to work and a balance of bacteria, enzymes, solids and water that is carefully maintained, and none of that is going to happen in a tank that is emptied every 7-10 days. Porta-potty companies used to use formaldehyde, but that’s more or less illegal in every state now. Neutralizers and scents used in porta-potties do and will work, but are pretty expensive, and those tanks are emptied a lot more often than people think.

Also, their primary tactic is volume as truly staggering amounts of biocides and perfumes are used in portapotties. You’ll need a second vehicle and some wealth to be able to afford it and transport it. Also, here’s a fun fact, the blue dye serves no purpose other than to mask the appearance of what it mixes with. I would like to interject here that we spent three summers cleaning bathrooms and we got up close and personal with pit toilets and port-a-johns. Since the company we worked for was trying to control costs we were limited on the amount of solutions we were allowed to use. Essentially based on that experience the toilets would smell clean for roughly 24 hours after pumping (less if it was a hot day) and nothing we tried lasted longer than a couple of days. You know what sort of worked? Air fresheners. – Trace

So, having told you all about how none of the stuff you can buy will “treat” your tanks, what are you left with? Well, my answer is: nothing. ? If you are using the tanks properly, and managing them the way they were designed to be managed, then they should operate as designed, which means minimal odors and chances of clogging. If you experiencing either odors or clogs, then you are operating the equipment incorrectly, or something is wrong with the equipment.

A holding tank is just that. It “holds” the stuff until you can dump it in a sewer. It’s just a giant bedpan with some fancy features to make it less gross. Some people think when they’re hooked up they can leave the black tank open to drain directly to the sewer. Don’t do that. If you leave the black tank open to drain directly into the sewer, the liquids will run out and the solids will not and eventually you will end up with a pyramid that is rock hard like concrete. Likewise, you should use plenty of water when you flush, just like at home. If you are stingy with the water, which some people do to maximize how long they can boondock without dumping, then you are upsetting the design balance.

Using special toilet paper is not the solution using more water is. I’ve also heard people talk about only using their black tank for poo, and peeing elsewhere and/or putting toilet paper in a trash can or bag. Again, not having enough liquids in the tank will make it more likely to clog. Paper in and of itself is not a clogging problem. It will fall apart if any pressure is put on it at all. Clogging is caused by solids, not water or paper, and making sure you have plenty of water in the bowl is the solution.

ANYTHING else that goes into the black tank is going to be a problem. Anything but toilet paper will clog it. Paper towels, wipes, whatever. If it’s not pee, poo or toilet paper, don’t flush it. The brand or type of toilet paper doesn’t matter. All that “swirl it in a glass of water” nonsense is a waste of time. Your RV tank is not a septic system, it doesn’t need septic safe toilet paper. Any toilet paper is OK if you use a bowl of water when you flush and you dump the tank when it’s full instead of only partially full.

And finally, the one thing you can do that will actually be worth the time and effort is to rinse the tank. And by rinse, I mean rinse it out by filling it with water and then emptying it. Dump it, then fill it and dump it again. When you dump the tank, most of the stuff in it will come out, but there will be some that is left behind. That’s the nature of solids and fluids and gravity. If you repeat the dumping and filling process, more stuff will come out every time. You don’t have to do that every time you dump, but once every four or five dumps will help prevent a buildup of sludge. And whenever possible, drive with the blank tank at least 1/3 to 1/2 full. The acceleration and deceleration of driving will slosh the liquids and solids around break up a lot of the solids, and much more will get cleaned out when you arrive and dump.

Speaking of which, don’t bother pouring ice down the toilet. It will melt long before you get any scrubbing benefit. This is another myth that persists even in the fact of basic science.

Hopefully this was useful information, and you will save yourself some money you can use for more fun stuff. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask them!

UPDATE: I got a question that I was originally going to do a full post on once we started traveling again, but I decided to just go ahead and answer it here and I will update it again with pictures once we start traveling again.

A reader (hi Jami!) asked about the heavy particles (sediment) that sit on the bottom of the gray tank, and how they can thicken as time goes by. They use a hose to “blast” down the toilet to break up stuff in the black tank, but you can’t really do that with a sink, and even if you could, the “P” traps and other turns would essentially negate the force of the water by the time it got to the gray tank. In particular the reader was concerned about staying put for a longish period of time, and how much sediment they might be building up by not being able to “scrub” the tanks by driving with them 2/3-ish full.

This is an excellent question, and one that I myself pondered about a year ago because we were sitting still for a long time ourselves. I noticed that we did very little actual travelling, and we were basically going from a 4 month stint of gate guarding to a 5 month stint at a summer gig, and not doing a lot of traveling. So I started thinking about how I could solve this problem before it became a problem, because filling up the gray tank and emptying in the same way as rinsing the black tank would tank a lot longer, because it’s a much bigger tank. So, last Spring I decided to try an experiment. We use a Flush King at the very end of the line on the rig, instead of just a black cap, for a variety of reasons. (Don’t let the apparent size of it worry you, the entire valve assembly rotates around the bayonet fittings, so it can be adjusted a full 360°!)

Reason #1, it’s clear plastic, so when I am dumping tanks, I can see what’s happening. It really is good to have an idea of what’s coming out of your tanks and going down the sewer line. If you can’t see, you don’t know. This allows me to monitor how fast things are moving and what’s moving. When I rinse the black tank, I know we’re as clean as we can get when I fill it up and all I see is clear when I dump it.

Reason #2, when I take off the cap, there is nothing in the cap. NOTHING. Because there’s a valve there, anything left in the pipe that might drip down, especially when I lift the front end to hook up, stays behind that gate where it belong, until I hook up a line and open the gate. I never get so much as moisture on my hands.

Reason #3, if there’s a leak in either of my valves, I’m going to know because that clear part is going to have something in it. No surprises!

Reason #4, twice in all of our time doing this, we have had “clogs” in the process of emptying the black tank, in both cases, it was a result of sitting in one place for too long boonndocking and trying to make the tanks last longer by using as little water as possible with each flush. So putting a hose on the Flush King and pushing water into the clog broke it loose.

This was the foundation of my experiment, because I was not worried about the possibility of a clog. I also knew that our rig rides a little “nose-high” when we’re hooked up. Not a lot, but a little. And I know that the outlet for my black and gray tanks is rear-facing. And finally, one of my favorite gadgets, the water meter.

This uses garden hose threads and can go anywhere inline between the spigot and your rig, and you can use it to keep track of how much fresh water is going into your rig. It’s incredibly handy to be able to know this stuff. You can use it when filling up your fresh water tank, you can use it to keep a running total of how much water you use in a day, or a week. And, if you want to know how much capacity a tank has, you can zero out the counter, and fill up your completely empty black or gray tank, and once it’s full, the meter will tell you how much it holds. If you have, for example, a 50 gallon gray tank, and you do this, and it takes 45 gallons, that means you have 5 gallons of gunk. (This is assuming that you are getting an accurate reading. The way to test that of course, is to fill something like a five gallon bucket, or a 1 gallon jug, and see if the meter is accurate. I’ve lost 4 of these things by forgetting to take them off the campground spigot, and they’ve all been accurate.)

So my method was to empty the gray tank completely right before we hit the road to travel for 5 or 6 days. Normally I try to travel with at least a half tank that first day to get some good sloshing going. But in this case I completely drained it and left the gray valve open, but closed the Flush King valve. We hitched up and drove all day, at least 6 or 7 hours. When we arrived at our campground I hurried back to the outlet and saw that the clear plastic pipe was indeed completely full. During the drive, what was in the gray tank had slid out and down the line and stopped at the valve. I hooked up a sewer hose and pulled the Flush King valve open and…….nothing. Nothing happened. I looked closer and saw that what I thought was gray water with a lot of white flecks of grease and food bits in it was actually more like a really, really, REALLY thick milkshake, or like a sediment sausage. It was just sitting there and not budging. I gave it a minute and just when I was starting to think I might need to start putting some water down a sink drain or maybe hook up a hose to blast from the outside, it verrrrrrry slowly started to ooze out and down the sewer hose. It took forever, because it was mostly sludge and hardly any liquid, but gravity eventually pulled it down into the hose. And there was a lot. I would say that there was at least 2 feet of that sludge that had to drain out and then it took rinsing some water down the sewer hose to break it up and speed it down the drain. I wasn’t really worried, because although it was dense, it wasn’t packed, and although it wasn’t really wet, it wasn’t dry either. It just took a while for it to move. I then closed the Flush King valve, but left the gray valve open, because I didn’t want to pack any gunk that might be sitting in the gray valve into the seal. We took showers and did dishes and I did laundry and once the gray tank was as full as I could get it, I opened the Flush King and let the “whoosh” do it’s job and then closed the gray valve. I did the same thing the next travel day, and got the same result, but with a shorter “sausage” of goop, and it was not as dense. On the third day there was nothing but a few inches in the flush King. So after almost 5 years, I probably drained three gallons of sediment, but that doesn’t mean much, because we spend the vast majority of our time sitting still, which I think contributes. I have noticed that whenever I “slosh” the gray tanks when we’re traveling what comes out is so dark it’s almost black. (Interestingly, a friend of mine recently bought a very old rig and had this same experience and just told me about it the other day!)

My conclusion on this is that this is something you shouldn’t worry too much about, and maybe do it as maintenance step every year, or maybe even every two years. For Jami, who has a 2001 and isn’t the original owner, I would say not to lose any sleep over it while you wait to start traveling again, but as soon as you start to travel, consider starting to work on clearing this stuff out. Not because I really think it’s that big of a deal, but you will get peace of mind, which isn’t nothing.

I highly recommend doing it while driving over the course of several days, so you aren’t living in a rig that’s jacked up all day waiting for this stuff work it’s way out. And only when you are going to be on full hookups at the end of each driving day so you can get more water in the system to keep anything from drying out. Tanks that are in constant use are always wet, and gray tanks get filled faster and more frequently so you don’t have to worry about this stuff hardening, but it IS a good idea to try to keep the tanks as clean as you can, at least in my opinion. Once we started traveling in a few weeks I will be doing this again because I want to see how much has accumulated in a year, and I also want to get some pictures and maybe some video with which I will update this post. Thanks again for the excellent question, Jami, and hopefully this is helpful.

If anyone else has any questions, please feel free to ask them in the comments!

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June 19, 2020 by Lee and Tracy

Trying to Get Our Life Back

As many others who are full time RVers, Lee and I have been talking about how to get moving again. The summer is ticking away, and for the first time in a long time we have a steady income that allows us to travel, but because of COVID concerns we have stayed in place. Don’t get me wrong, we are incredibly grateful to Cori and Greg for allowing us to stay with them so long, but hitch itch is a real thing, and I am anxious to get moving again.

Part of those feelings come from the fact that an RV is a small space. Generally that trade-off is worth it as it is the vehicle (literally) that allows us to visit cool places, but when we are in one place for a long time I start to miss having more living space. Unfortunately the COVID situation is incredibly fluid and the south in particular has experienced a spike in the number of cases. Lee is high risk because of his 35+ years of smoking and heart attack, so we need to weigh the desire to move with our very real concerns about protecting his health.

There are two very strong factors though that are pushing us to move. One is the weather, and the desire to head north and/or to higher elevations to beat the heat is strong. We have done an outstanding job all these years of following the weather and for the first time are experiencing a summer in the deep south. That forces us inside, which exacerbates the feeling of confinement in small spaces and the combination of the heat and COVID has stopped us from almost all outdoor activities.

The second factor is that my grandson turns one on July 20th. I feel really lucky that we have the ability to be with him on his birthday, but unfortunately COVID keeps getting in the way. After much discussion, Lee and I agreed that we would head east on July 5th and would take our time getting there. We have rushed through Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia more times than I can count, but we have time (and I have taken no vacation this year) so we can stop and see a few things and finally get our state stickers. We were fine with working through individual restrictions on places we wanted to see and still felt we could be both safe and enjoy our travel.

Unfortunately we have experienced problems on the other end. Both my daughter and my son-in-law work at restaurants, and those restaurants have both been open for a few weeks. South Carolina has thrown caution to the winds on their reopening strategy and not surprisingly people in both of their restaurants have been exposed to Covid. Testing in South Carolina is still very slow, and people are waiting 3-7 days to get results. Once those results come in, everyone else gets tested and it’s a two week cycle before people know if they have it. Craziness. Especially since I got a 15 minute test in Texas and got my results same day recently. They were negative by the way!

**As a side note, before deciding to eat in your favorite restaurant be aware that many states do NOT require testing or require reporting if one of their employees gets sick. Restaurants do NOT have to close, as I previously thought. Personally we are only doing carryout and then microwaving once we get home. The only exception to the microwave rule is fast food restaurants who seems to be taking all the right precautions.

There is no point in heading east if one or both of them get sick, so we are waiting to see. And we understand that even if we head that way we could need to divert at the last minute. These concerns are nothing of course compared to their lack of income and their concerns about being sick, but for someone who likes to have a plan in situations like these it is tough. I also miss my grandson terribly and although we Facetime frequently I really miss holding him.

All that being said, I need to put my husband’s health first. And it is difficult when so many people refuse to social distance and wear masks in public. I strive very hard to keep politics out of this blog, but when they intersect with my RV life in such a huge way I feel I can comment. In my opinion it is a small thing to ask to protect the safety of others, but I continually see people in Texas who are mask free and refuse to keep their distance. In general less than 50% of the people are wearing masks here, and there have been several times when I am the only person with a mask on in a store and that includes the employees.

We still aren’t going out that much, but we have been testing the waters in order to make our decision, and it saddens me to see the behavior. I understand the strong desire to get back to normal. I fight with it myself everyday, but I wear my mask just in case. The day after I got tested and had my COVID free paperwork in hand, I still wore a mask because it was the right thing to do. Other people wouldn’t know I was just tested and there was a small chance I picked up the virus while getting the test itself. I would never want to be responsible for getting someone else sick and for me it is a small and reasonable price to pay.

Others feel differently though, and whether that is motivated by politics or selfishness it doesn’t really matter. The general consensus seems to be if you are at risk stay home and let everyone else do what they want. Well, that’s fine I suppose, if you aren’t in the at risk category, but for those of us who have people who are its a really shitty deal. Sorry for the language, but the situation is frustrating. Anyway that is where we are. I’ll let you know what happens as we get closer to the tentative departure date!

Supporting our Blog

We very much appreciate your support of our blog.

You can purchase the ebook telling the story of how we became full-time RVers.
You can purchase our recipe book filled with 80 recipes we have cooked in our RV and taste tested by Lee himself. You can purchase the kindle or paperback version on Amazon or buy the Apple version on iTunes.

June 14, 2020 by Lee and Tracy

Why You Shouldn’t Leave Your Tank Valves Open

Written by Lee who takes our tank management VERY Seriously

Before I even get started, I want to point out that this is intended to help people, and the opinions are mine, based on my experiences. Your mileage may vary. I am aware that some people feel differently and do things differently. I wrote this post because I am constantly seeing online discussions about all the reasons why and why not, to leave either a gray tank, or a black tank, or both (?!?!?!?!?!?!?) open when parked somewhere and hooked up to a sewer line. Most of the time these discussions are about people being parked for a long time, sometimes with a semi-permanent “hard” sewer line from their outlet to the sewer hookup. But sometimes people talk about doing it when they’re somewhere for a weekend. I have seen this discussion literally hundreds of times and I have spent so much time trying to help people, but I am tired of typing out the same things over and over, and arguing with experts who have been RVing for XXX years and know everything, but are still wrong. So now I can just put this link in and walk away. Here’s a spoiler: if you trust me and want to know what to do, and don’t want to read the entire post. Ready?

Do NOT, ever, under any circumstances, for any reason, leave your gray tank valve open, for any length of time other than to empty or “dump” and/or rinse the tank.

Do NOT, ever, under any circumstances, for any reason, leave your black tank valve open, for any length of time other than to empty or “dump” and/or rinse the tank.

Thanks for stopping by!

Here’s the long version….

Since the first day we owned our rig I have been obsessed with our gray and black holding tanks. (Initially I found that kind of weird but later I was grateful for it – Tracy) There’s a lot of reasons for my obsession, but the number one reason is that I can’t see them. They are hidden above the “belly pan”, (which is the plastic sheeting that protects everything on the bottom of your RV. It’s what you see when you get under your rig and look up) and below the floor of the “basement” storage area. It really stresses me out that I can’t see these things, and inspect them periodically, and even check out the inside of them. As full timers, I am acutely aware of how important these tanks are, and so from day one I have considered taking good care of them to be as important as keeping rain out of the rig. They are also HUGE. In most rigs they are 8-12″ tall and generally 4-5′ long and 2 1/2-3′ wide. Really big. More importantly, they are generally difficult (if not impossible) to remove without doing some major tearing apart of a rig. So you don’t want to have to replace these things, or have to get to them to do any repairs unless you absolutely have to. For me, I have been trying to make sure that I do everything I can to keep the insides of my tanks as clean and trouble free as is reasonably possible.

Here’s the bottom of your rig. See the tanks? Exactly.

The good news is, they are incredibly uncomplicated, and generally give people no trouble. There’s not much to them. Usually, RV holding tanks are made of ABS plastic or polyethylene. They will have an inlet, and an outlet. Some black tanks might also have another inlet for rinsing. On a black tank, they are usually directly below the toilet, and the toilet drains directly into them. That’s a great setup, because you can open the flush valve and look directly down with a flashlight when the water is turned off, and actually see inside the tank. A small portion, at least. In some cases, like ours, the pipe is offset a little between the toilet drain and the tank inlet. For gray tanks, it matters less, but they take drain water from usually at least two sinks and the shower. All of those drains come together into one pipe that then goes into the tank. In some cases there is more than one gray tank.

This is what most gray and black holding tanks look like. Not much to them.

Each tank is emptied or dumped through the use of a gate/blade valve. The valve is a very simple door that is a thin piece of plastic sandwiched between two plastic flanges and rubber gaskets. The rubber gaskets are what make the gate waterproof, but the flanges are what makes it possible for the gate to close.

For most rigs, there’s a handle for each tank and it’s usually 5 or more feet from the valve.

This is the important part! Molded into the flange is a very shallow (1/4″) indentation of the plastic, all the way around the bottom of the opening. This creates a void that is the same thickness as the gate, and the gate slides into and seats in this void. Remember this, because it’s going to come back to haunt you. You can see the void in the picture below, with the arrow pointing to it. Just above it is the edge of the blade that slides down into the void.

When you open your gray valve, liquids from the kitchen, bathroom sink, and shower will flow into the tank. Then they flow right out through the gate into to your outlet hose and finally into the sewer. Except what goes down the drain isn’t just liquids. In the shower, for example, there’s the water, of course, but there’s also dirt, and oil, and hair, and soap (which is a dissolved solid) and tiny little pieces of you. I know, it’s gross, but it means that at best, the shower water is a solution of various things dissolved in water, and at worst a liquid carrying small solids.

The bathroom sink is not quite as bad, but again, soap, dirt, dust, hair and toothpaste, all going down the drain. If you have a washing machine, again, soap is in that water, the dirt from your clothes, and of course, whatever little schnibblies you had in your pocket, all going down that drain into your gray tank.

The worst culprit is the kitchen sink. Now I know lots of people are reading this and thinking to themselves, “I use a sink strainer religiously, no food EVER gets into my gray tank!” Good for you. You have successfully kept ALL food particles out of your gray tank, except for the particles small enough to fit through the holes, and the ones that are around the edges of the strainer that fall into the drain when you pull out the strainer and they slip right down into the drain into the gray tank. And of course all the other stuff that sneaks by that you didn’t even notice. Trust me, there’s a LOT more going down that drain than you think.

Depending on your lifestyle and your tank capacity, you are going to fill your gray tank anywhere from every two days to every week. And it’s full of water, hair, soap scum, grease scum, particles of food floating and settled, dirt, all manner of nasty stuff, almost all of which is organic, which is why it smells soooo bad. It’s rotting biological material, which creates it’s own gunk. It’s not so much a tank full of water as a tank full of a solution, which includes a fair amount of sediment, or sludge, and some solids.

To illustrate this, I recently extracted the solids from the water during one of our gray tank dumps. I know everyone is a little different, so this is just us, but I also think we’re all mostly in the center of the spectrum. Here are our details, as pertains to this topic: we haven’t been using the washing machine for months because where we are has a washer and dryer that we can use. And I aggressively try to avoid food getting down the drain. We typically fill our gray tank up every two and a half days. We both shower every day. So let’s see what was in our tank besides water!

When you dump your tank, if there’s nothing blocking it, there’s a WHOOSH as the weight of all that gray water is pushed out of the outlet hole in the tank and out through the gate valve, through your hose and into the sewer pipe. Water weighs eight pounds per gallon, and the average gray tank is 50-60 gallons, so you’ve got nearly 500 lbs trying to push that water through the hole. Water doesn’t compress, so there’s a fair amount of pressure, especially at the very beginning. If you have any kind of a transparent add-on gate between your rig and your sewer hose, or a section of clear pipe as part of your sewer hose setup, you can sometimes see glimpses of white chunks flying past in the water, that’s soap scum and/or grease that you’re seeing. It tends to clump together and since it’s white it’s easier to see.

I decided to use nylon hose, because it’s strong and flexible, and stretchy, but has a very tight weave, letting water out, but no solids or even grease or soap scum. I put it between the sewer outlet on the rig, and the sewer hose. It’s important to note that when I did this, it significantly slowed down the draining process, because the water had to go through the hose, and everything that was caught in the hose. So that “whoooosh” of force that pushes gunk out was much, much less than it usually is, so I don’t think this is everything. Using this less than ideal method, what you see below is what got trapped in the “filter”. That’s about 2 tablespoons of gunk. Plus there was a fair amount of grease coating the inside of the pantyhose, that couldn’t remove from the hose. So that should answer any questions people have about what’s in their gray water besides gray water! (On a side note I had no idea he was doing this and I walked by our outside table and thought the dog had thrown up. It was super disgusting and I was shocked when he told me it had come from our gray tank. – Tracy)

So, you’ve opened your valve and dumped your tank. You should close it before it’s completely empty. Once the water flow slows down, close your valve before it trickles or stops. The bottom of your tank includes quite a lot of sludge/sediment, and you don’t want that to get to the gate if you can avoid it. Close the valve and go on about your life. When you travel, be sure to travel with at least 1/2 of a tank of water, or if you’ve been sitting for a long time, try to have a full gray tank on your first travel day. It will slosh around and loosen up the sediment, and when you stop for the night, dump the gray tank as soon as possible. You will be amazed at how much solids are in that water. It will be almost black and be more like a thick milkshake than water. (I know many people will fuss about the extra gas this will cost, but we have done this for years and I am always amazed by how dirty that first flush is after a travel day. – Tracy)

So here’s the part that matters and why you shouldn’t leave that gray valve open. When the valve is open, and water hits the tank from the shower or sink drains, the water will flow right out, but it will leave behind the solids and the sediment. But, the sediment and solids such as are pictured above will slowly flow towards that gate, and eventually, it will slide through, and the smallest bits will settle in that 1/4″ molded recess. That’s bad, but not as bad as what happens next. When you finally close the valve, it comes down like a hydraulic press and compresses that sediment. Then it all dries. And now you have a thin layer of dried “sediment cement” that’s pushed and hardened into that tiny void. Do this enough times and that recess will be completely filled. And then the gate will no longer seat properly, and eventually it won’t even close all the way. The gate is curved, so there will be a LOT of open space, and it will leak gray water into the outlet pipe and every time you take off the cap, you will get a half gallon or so of that water on your hands and shoes. Unfortunately, there really isn’t a way to remedy the problem of that void being gunked up short of removing the gate and scraping out the gunk, or replacing the valve. Usually those valves are hard to get to, and if you’re paying someone else to do it, that means expensive.

In summary Lee’s recommendations:

Do what you can to avoid stuff getting down that drain!
But remember that some will always sneak past.
Whenever possible, dump the tank only when it’s completely full, to get the benefit of the water pressure.
Close it before it’s empty.
When you travel after sitting for a while, try to drive the first day with a full tank and dump as soon as you can after stopping for the night.

If anyone has any questions about this or anything else, please feel free to ask them. I’ll do my best to answer them or get an answer, or make something up that sounds plausible.

Coming up next I will talk about holding tank treatments, whether or not they do anything, and if they’re worth the money.

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