This isn’t Dometic’s fault, so I can’t blame them, as much as I’d like to! It’s also not the fault of Grand Design, or Palm Beach RV… Or us, thankfully! It’s one of those things that just happens, and needs a fix!
The day before Thanksgiving, we were back in Cincinnati, (at Indian Springs Campground) doing a lot of laundry, cleaning, I was cooking whatever I could ahead of time, getting ready to have our friends and family Thanksgiving dinner that Friday. (Allen was fishing… He did help me though!)
After about the 3rd load of the day, I went in the bedroom to get our clothes out and stepped on super soaked carpet! My first thought was that Eustace was revolting on his house training, to be totally honest! But when I put a towel down to soak up the moisture, it soaked THROUGH the towel. So I grabbed another. Soaked. I looked out the door and told Allen about it and he came in to investigate. We dug out the shop vac (that I’ve been wanting to get rid of for over a year now) and set it in the bedroom and let it do it’s thing. It soaked up about an inch of water fairly quickly! Uh oh.
If you’ve been following our blog, you’ll know this isn’t the first issue we’ve had with this combo unit! We also DIY fixed it when it threw an E3A error code down in Florida a few months back…
Then Allen says, “We need to rip up that carpet and see what’s going on.”
I walked outside, not on board. Mind you, he was meeting his family at 7am Thanksgiving morning. Then going to his mom’s for dinner, then picking up his kids to stay the night. I was going to my mom’s and having dinner at my aunt’s house then planning to come back to the camper Friday morning and start getting ready for our best friend Brandi to come over for the meal I was cooking. And we were leaving Sunday to go back to work. So no, I had to talk him down from tearing up my house!
We couldn’t see a leak in the big cubby, we pulled the washer out of the closet nook and looked as far as we could, not seeing anything. Allen cut a hole in the closet wall to see more of the pex bringing water in, and to see the drain pipe as far as we could. Nothing. It wasn’t getting any wetter so we crossed the water inlet leaking off the list. It had to be something with the drain.
We ran a hose from outside, through the door, into the closet and I sprayed it down the drain pipe while Allen stayed outside and looked at the clear elbow. We were thinking that possibly some lint had gotten clogged in the horizontal pipe and if we put some pressure on it, it might come out. We got lint coming out. But then I noticed the track of the closet filling up with water so we stopped.
We thought that possibly a fitting had come loose on the pvc type drain pipes, maybe it wasn’t glued well and rattled loose, or rubbed against something and got a crack or a hole… Who knows! But we weren’t doing anything about it on a Wednesday night, before Thanksgiving, that was for sure!
We debated all weekend what to do, how to handle it… Was it something we could tackle ourselves or was it beyond our scope of DIY and would we have to put it in the shop? How long would that take? We would have to split up if we went the shop route because there was no way Allen, myself and both puppies could feasibly hotel hop, so I’d have to stay at my mom’s while he worked… We’d have to put all our “things” in storage and pack all of our clothes we’d need while it was in the shop. You hear horror stories of campers being in “service” for months at a time… But we started making a list of everything we would have them fix if we went that route (just little things that we haven’t gotten to). On top of that, would it be under warranty or would we have to make an insurance claim? We’d still need to pay the deductible on that, and neither of us has ever made a claim, so where do you start? Would it double our rate next year on top of everything else? If we tried to do it ourselves, when would we have time?
There was a job lasting a few days up near Columbus, Ohio after Thanksgiving, where we stayed on site.
After that it back to Evansville, Indiana (this time we stayed at Lynnville Park Campground) so Allen could kill some time at the shop between jobs. The first weekend we were here, we dove in.
We started by taking the dresser out, and the closet doors off and pulled the track up.
We weren’t sure how the carpet was laid and assumed it was all one piece. Then we started pulling it up from near the wall. Turns out, the little “curb” if you will was it’s own piece of carpet. We didn’t see a leak on any of the pipes under the “curb”…
But we could see a drip when we turned on the washer at the elbow from the wall in the closet to where they turn flat to go through the “curb” (I don’t know what else to call that thing).
Allen got in the closet and pulled another panel off under the shelf where the washer/dryer sits. You can access the waterless trap there and that had come loose by a couple turns! What the heck! We ran a couple more rinse and spin cycles to watch and make sure everything was good.
Then headed to Lowe’s for a staple gun to put the carpet back down and a piece of wood to patch the hole Allen cut with a saw zall! Overall, we did more than we had to, but it was good to have the assurance that the wood wasn’t wet and molding… Better safe than sorry I guess!
Eustace wanted to eat the screws!
**The moral of the story… If you have a wet floor and can’t see a leak: look for an access panel to the waterless trap and be sure that didn’t wiggle loose!
Easy peasy, and no putting our HOME in the shop and living with parents and in motels across the country!
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Home Sweet Home on Wheels 