Any plumber knows the meaning of this term. And when “it” no longer flows downhill, he stands to make money by finding out why and fixing the problem. To the RV owner, keeping “it” flowing downhill usually is not a money issue, but can lead to great frustration and messy sanitation issues both for you and those who use your RV space after you.
Perhaps you have pulled into a park and encountered…
a fouled area surrounding the sanitary connection point of the parking space that you have selected. Visual clues are easy to find. You can only imagine what might have occurred here before you arrived. Maybe something similar has even happened in the past to you?
The designers and craftsmen who built your RV follow the Plumbing Codes in the construction of your sanitary piping system with proper slope from the waste tanks to the outlet port of your RV discharge. So keeping “it” flowing to the discharge connection point usually is not a problem. But keeping “it” flowing properly to the park system sanitary pipe connection point is your responsibility if you want to avoid making a mess of this already sometimes tricky, but necessary, procedure of connecting and disconnecting your “stinky slinky”.
Why should this matter to you? The most common cause of accidental sewage waste spill is due to the release of unexpected trapped waste inside your sewer hose. You can’t see what’s inside this hose, and “it” hides in any dip or reversed slope section of the pipe that it can find. The bigger the dip, or trap as it’s called, the more of “it” is lurking, waiting to rush out of the hose when you disconnect. To practice good housekeeping at your site, you should guard against such spillage. After all, no one wants to encounter a spill that can be both unsightly and unsanitary. And certainly no one wants to track any of this stuff, including incidental bacteria, back inside their RV.
Spillage can easily occur at either end of the hose when disconnecting if waste is allowed to remain trapped inside. And if you have ever had your sewer hose to freeze in cold weather with trapped accumulations inside, you will never want this to happen again.
The obvious solution to minimizing spillage problems is to make sure that your sewer hose slopes continuously from your RV outlet to the park’s connection point, thereby keeping the hose interior as free from accumulated waste as possible. Imagine, if you will, dropping a marble into the sewer hose at your RV outlet. Ideally, this imaginary marble would roll continuously along the bottom of your hose and fall into the park sewer hose connection pipe at the end. But due to many reasons, this is not always as simple as stated. Laying your hose along the ground is rarely the best solution to proper and continuous downward slope. The ground between your RV and the connection point may be not sloped as you desire, or there may be obstacles in your path. Or your hose may be arranged to cross over your water hose, your electrical cable, or even your sewer hose itself if you have used a section that is way too long. Often, the park has a concrete pad to anchor the connection point piping and this pad is raised above the surrounding grade level, introducing an uphill situation near the connection point right where you don’t want it. Marbles don’t roll far uphill.
There are numerous commercially available aids for achieving proper slope on your sewer hose. There are plastic, or metal, or even sophisticated expanding devices that cradle your hose and use the built-in slope designed into the device to help keep “it” flowing. I have observed countless improvised devices that do the same thing, everything from long plastic gutter sections, PVC pipe sections sawn lengthwise to form a trough, and bricks, sticks and even flower pots on which to rest the hose to achieve the desired slope. Be prepared for whatever it takes to connect properly and be a good camping neighbor. Take the necessary steps to keep things contained where they should be, and keep that marble rolling!
yudamann