Cleaning the black tank

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Black tank cleaning.  Attempt # 1.  


The last few trips we’ve been on my black tank sensor has consistently read ½, even though I know the tank is ‘empty’.  This is pretty common in black tanks, solid waste will stick to the walls and give false readings.  I was hoping to resolve the issue this season, so I decided to try combining the sanitation of the fresh water tank with a good cleaning of the black tank.

I don’t have a sprayer wand, but I thought if I put a fairly decent amount of hot water in the tank and then took the RV for a drive, it might help loosen up the solid waste and clean things a bit.  I also threw in some dishwasher detergent at the wife's suggestion to help things along.  The reason you would want to use dishwasher detergent for this sort of thing is that it’s designed to foam less.  You know this if you have ever thought that you could just put some dish soap in the dishwasher and run it.  When the foam started to seep out of the door seal onto the kitchen floor you probably realized this wasn’t really the best of ideas.

I decided that I wanted hot water, but not boiling, since I would need to transport the water into the black tank.  I have recently been turned onto something called Sous Vide cooking, which uses a precision water heating apparatus and is done in a pot with water.  So, I got my large stock pot and put it in the bathtub of the rig, put my Sous Vide cooker in place, added water and then set my temperature.  The Sous Vide lets you pick the temp you want the water and maintain it over the course of the cooking process.  I selected 150 degrees, hotter than I can get from my home water heater, but not hot enough to damage the tank.  My plan was to dump two pots worth of water, roughly six gallons, into the tank and then we would transit to the campground, about an hour away.  This would let the water slosh around inside the tank and, with any luck, remove the stray solid waste from the sensor.

Sous Vide Cooker and water pot in the tub

Another thing I’d want to do is put the stabilizer jacks down.  I didn’t do it because we were at the curb in front of the house and I wasn’t planning to be there for a long time.  I’m not sure if the motion of the camper made it harder for the Sous Vide cooker to circulate and heat the water.  I’d imagine not, but I wasn’t sure.

The first pot of hot water in so I put the second on to heat and went about the evolution of sanitizing the fresh tank, which I will cover in another post.  Once the second pot was hot I dumped it into the toilet and then tossed in the dishwasher soap.  With water in all the tanks we hit the road.

My Target

If you’re not used to driving your rig with much or anything in your tanks you can expect it to handle differently.  Free Surface Effect will change how it handles, so give yourself a little time to get used to it.  We are normally campground campers, so I’m not used to having anything in the tanks, especially not 15+ gallons of fresh water plus 1/5th of my waste tanks.  

We made the trip to the campground with no incidents, and I went through the work of purging the tanks.  Since I had also been sanitizing the fresh tank I decided that I would dump my second rinse of that tank into the black tank to help clean it out.  It required a lot of standing with my foot on the flush lever for the toilet (next time I’ll use a brick maybe) but it gave me plenty of water through the black tank.

The process seemed to work.  It might not have been the best way to do it, but it was a way to do it with the tools I have.  

Lesson Learned.


The process of heating that volume of water took a bit longer than I would have liked.  If I were to repeat this process I think I would use the Sous Vide to stabilize the water temp, but use the stove or some other method to preheat the water to shorten the time to hitting my precise temp mark.  I could have used the stove for the entire evolution, but it’s only three of so feet from the tub to the toilet, instead of the five or six feet from my cook top and carrying that pot full of hot water that far was not something I was willing to try.  I might use more water next time as well, to try and hit the half way mark for the tank.

Tell me how you’ve cleaned out your black tanks, or ideas you’ve thought of to try.  I’d love to hear from you about your RV adventures.

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