Travels With Miranda

I found a little bit of water in the bottom of the shower this afternoon and couldn’t understand it for a long second. Oh, right. Silly gal. Your grey tank is FULL!

I’ve been able to leave my grey valve open where I’ve been parked in the last long while, so I haven’t had to manage my grey tank at all. I haven’t emptied it since Hampton Roads and had a couple of long showers here.

Like most places, you cannot dump grey water on the ground here, so I did an old trick. I grabbed a big bucket and filled it from the grey tank, then emptied it in the black through the toilet. I did this four times and got my grey tank down to a third full. This barely nudged up the level in the black and will actually make it easier to empty when I go dump next week.

I’m really hoping the weather will cooperate and let me complete my solid four weeks of boondocking experiment when I get to Texas. If so, then I will need to find a better way to manage grey water dumping I will run out of space in the black tank after so many weeks. My writing partner Will has some seemingly more manageable alternatives to Blue Boys, described in our ebook, and I am going to explore them.

The entrance stairwell is no longer an embarrassment! My mother cut a new access panel for the water pump/rear of the stairwell:

She cut the top of the board on a bevel to make the edge less catching. Notice the two little pulls for removing the panel. I gave the board several coats of dark brown spray paint today.

The board is held in place by two roller catches:

A visual check of the fresh water tank is the easiest way to monitor levels, so an easy access panel was important to me. This fits the bill!

When I winterized my fresh water system last fall, a few people told me not to put any anti-freeze in the fresh water holding tank as it would leave a bad taste. Well, I never drink from the tank and I had a theory, so I decided to do it anyway. Here’s a shot of my tank last fall:

Notice that dark band at the bottom? You would be incorrect in thinking that it is simply the anti-freeze showing through the tank. The anti-freeze was not that dark. That dark band has been there since I can remember and all my clear lines were that colour. That black stuff is fungus and the reason why my water has always smelled musty. I tried to shock my system a number of times with bleach, but I could never get rid of those spore sgrowing in my fresh water system. I eventually figured out that I need to live off my holding tank rather than connecting to city water, but by that point the infestation was pretty severe.

My theory last fall was that letting my fresh water system, including the holding tank, soak in anti-freeze for six months would kill off everything living in it.

This is what my fresh water holding tank looks like now:

I have never, not even when I first started traveling, seen it so clear.

I feel that I made the right decision putting the anti-freeze through the whole system. I gave the fresh water system a good flush before leaving Lethbridge. There was a whiff of an anti-freeze smell while on my first holding tank of water, but now that I have refilled it a couple of times, all I get is clear water that I have actually felt comfortable brushing my teeth with. I’d call that an improvement!