👀 Genius RV Mod! A New Way To Store Your RV Sewer Tote

[Music] portable waist totes are super handy when you're in partial hookup sites to be able to take your waste water from your campsite to a dump station without having to move the RV they come in multiple different sizes and they are one of the second tier pieces of equipment that you have when RV they're not essential but it is super convenient to be able to take the tote to the dump station versus having to move your RV when your tanks are full when you have partial hookup sites and a lot of rvers store their portable waist totes on the back of the RV either on a bumper mounted plate or hanging it off of their RV ladder now there's several things that I don't like about it one it's just unsightly I really don't like seeing a big gray and orange tote or a big blue tote hanging off the back of my RV as I'm traveling down the road and second a little more practical than aesthetic is that the totes are then sitting out in the sun which means the life expectancy is shorter because the UV rays are going to bake that plastic make it brittle and you definitely don't want a brittle plastic tote carrying your black water from your site to the dump station that would be a really bad day getting it stored underneath the RV gets it out of the Sun fund and protects it from UV exposure the unfortunate part about this is there's no off-the-shelf product that allows you to do that so today I want to show you the DIY modification that I did to be able to store our Wastewater tote underneath our RV and now my RV came with a swing around Grill and a spare tire off the rear bumper and so adding the tote to the rear bumper wasn't an option and I don't have a ladder so I couldn't hang it there so both those options functionally were off the table for me when we started rving with this rig and so I needed another option and that's when I started looking for things to suspend it underneath the trailer I found the Bal High despair which is a suspension system that allows you to store a spare tire between the frame of your RV and pull it out from the side when you need to get to it it's basically some pipes that fit into each other and is slung between one side of the frame to the other side of the frame you undo the bracket you can slide the spare tire carrier out I thought that that application would be perfect if I could get it to fit my Wastewater tote tank the difficult part being the the depth the tote is going to be much deeper than the width of a tire laying flat on its side and so they make two different options one of them is four trailers that have an enclosed underbelly and one is for trailers that do not have an enclosed underbelly the difference being the one for enclosed underbelly sits down a little bit further the bracket is a bit longer a bit deeper so that you can fit the spare tire beneath the plastic underlayment for the enclosed underbelly and so I decided to order that one just to give me as much room as I could between the trailer and the tote to see if this project would even work so this height of bear is rated to carry no more than 100 pounds on the carrier itself so measuring the different options of waist totes out there all the things that I could find were below 50 pounds so well within the capacity of this spare tire carrier So based off of all our tank size we decided to go with the 28 gallon version of this portable waist tote there's some larger ones out there I've seen 36 I've seen 42 the version of ours that comes in the 36 gallon option the difference in height is only an inch according to the manufacturer's website site and so there's a high probability that this could work for you as well if you've got the larger tote and a side note from experience if you can get the versions that have four wheels so they've got two wheels in the front in addition to the two wheels at the back and the tongue make it more like a wagon those ones are infinitely easier to use than the ones where you have to pick it up and roll it on two wheels and in my opinion are definitely worth the extra cost for ease of use think about it this way a full 28 gallons on my tank is well over 200 pounds of dynamic water weight being able to pull that with a wagon tongue and not have to actually lift it when I'm going over bumps up slight inclines out of a campsite trying to get around everything to where the truck is to then go pull it off to the dump station the extra two wheels in the tongue make a huge difference in how easy it is to use the portable Wastewater tank so after receiving the high to spare I figured out on my rig the best place to mount it was going to be in front of the front tires now I've got two gray tanks and one black tank and a freshwater tank so I've got four tanks underneath my RV based off of where those were and also can considering the approach and departure angles and ground clearance right in front of the front axle was the best place for me and after using this for over two years 18 months of that full timing I have never once encountered a situation where this hanger touched anything so right in front of the front wheels has worked for me I would imagine right behind the rear axle would work what I wouldn't want to do is put it too far forward or too far backwards because then you're going to encroach upon your departure and approach angles but obviously that's going to all depend on each person's individual rig and talking about individual rigs this is only going to work on certain RVs you're not going to be able to do this on an Airstream they sit way too low you're not going to be able to get this mounted beneath the frame and if you want to connect with other rvers talk about gear reviews DIY projects and travel destinations make sure you come over and check out our free group RV gear and far I'll put a link in the description box below now my frame is just under 24 inches from ground to the bottom of the frame and so I now have a ground clearance of about 11 inches from the bottom of this bracket when it's in the stored position my axles sit about 12 and change so it's slightly lower than the axles but again two years of traveling the country full time around 17 000 miles I've never touched anything with this bracket now the bracket doesn't come with the mounting hardware which I'm not quite sure why but what I ended up doing there's six holes on the bracket to mount to the frame on each side I did four of those with self-tapping screws and then I decided to drill out and use bolts and nylocks for the others just to give it that extra vibration security it's a pretty simple install you install the bracket on one side of the RV then you come over to the other side of the RV and install that bracket as well make sure you measure and put the brackets so that they're in the same spot along the frames so that when you install the pipes that they are parallel to each other and that when you pull out the carrier then it will slide correctly and straight here's two bonus sewer mods that I did that I use on a daily basis one was drilling a hole in the bumper of our RV allowing me to put these hitch Clips in and keep the end caps and the hoses all in there I have no worries about them flying out as we're traveling down the road and two is getting these plastic ammo cans and some u-bolts and attaching them to my RV bumper this allows me to store gloves elbows all the accoutrements that I need for using the sewer on the bumper so on a normal day when I'm dumping my tanks or hooking up at a dump station the only place I go is the bumper everything is back there and accessible ready to use and I don't have to store any of my normal sewer stuff in a tote in the RV now since I'm adapting the spare tire carrier let's talk about how I secured the tote to the carrier you can't just set the toad up there and expect it to stay while moving and so what I did is got a half inch piece of pressure treated plywood and I traced out the tote on top cutting inside the wheels and then cutting that out with a saw now the reason that I did that is so that the wheels could sit over the plywood and kind of Nestle Down doing it that way adds to the containment you know the wheels slide over the plywood so it can't shift left and right and it also brings it down a little bit further from the frame to give me that much more clearance going in and out then I took some one inch u-bolts and I attached that plywood to the polls on the spare tire carrier then I got some large 10 inch L brackets and attach those on the long sides of the board so that it cradles the tote as it sits down in there with the L brackets and the plywood cutouts for the wheels this tote is going nowhere once that carrier is hooked up and attached to the frame there's no physical possibility for the tote to jump out but what I didn't want was that toad to jump around as we're going down the road so two simple straps wrapped around the tote tightening it to the bars and to the plywood frame make sure that this tote doesn't move around at all while we're driving and so these portable waist totes have a few pieces of special equipment that they need in order to hook up to your RV and I didn't want to keep those in with my other stuff and so what I did is I got an old battery box and the places where the two bolts would normally attached to the spare tire I drilled holes in that box and set the Box on top now I can put the elbow the hose the flush hose all those accessories into that battery box put the lid on wrap it with the strap and has traveled over 17 000 miles like that works perfect keeps these things that I need for the tote with the tote and easily accessible when I need to pull them out after putting those u-bolts on before tightening everything down I did a dry fit to make sure that the clearances were going to work one thing I have figured out while using this over the past two years is that if we're going to use the tote we got to make sure to take it out before we level the RV so sometimes when we pull into a set we know that we're going to be nose down in order to be level we'll raise the tongue up a little bit get the tote out then level the RV so that we don't have to worry about messing with trying to go off to the side of the bracket or under the bracket or get it left right it's just easier to get it out when I can lift the tongue of the RV pull it out with ease then level the RV and that also means that then we're putting the waist tilt back as one of the last things on a pack up day and I think this goes without saying but this is to store an empty tote you never want to fill the tote and then put it on this bracket you're going to run into a bad situation so this is to store an empty tote not to actually transport waste water if you're finding any value in these ideas make sure you click that like button and follow the channel we've got got a lot of DIY projects and gear reviews and a ton more coming it goes a long way in telling me what kind of content you do like what kind of gear reviews you want to see and what kind of DIY projects we can do in the future so is this modification for everybody no I don't think it is I wanted to show you guys this modification in this video just to give you an idea on different ways that you can store your Wastewater tote if you already have a ladder and you don't mind it's sitting out in the sun and don't care about how it looks off the back of your RV that is the easiest and cheapest way to store your Wastewater tote you hook it up on the ladder you strap it down and Away you go if you don't have a ladder or you want to put on the other side there are L brackets that attach to the back of your bumper strap around it and Away you go again Aesthetics and more importantly to me UV exposure were the reasons that I wanted to get this Up and Under the RV so with this Wastewater tote lasts a lot longer than if it were sitting off the back of my RV ground clearance is another thing again you're not going to be putting this on an Airstream they just sit way too low so if you don't have the ground clearance to add underneath your frame then this may not fit for you and being it I don't have an enclosed underbelly I can't say for sure that this would fit however it looks as though it sits right at the frame based off of how high it goes with the plywood and then the tote and so with an enclosed underbelly my guess would be that if I were to close this up that the tote tank would touch the underbelly so after using this tote for over two years what are some things I would change about it well one I think I would make the bracket one inch longer giving it just that one extra inch would make sure that anybody would be able to do this modification and use the Wastewater tote on the same Principle as the spare tire carrier now the other thing I would do is I would either figure out how to remove the entire bracket when taking the carrier down or how to make it hinge so that the bracket that the entire thing hangs on when I take that down it's out of the way it would give me a lot more clearance to be able to pull the tote out which would just make things easier I wouldn't have to lift the RV up as high to get the tote out and finally a few squirts of lubrication on the opposite inside where the poles slide into each other definitely helps and goes a long way it'd be really cool to figure out some way to make a little bit less friction I don't know whether that be a plastic coating on the end of the cap to make it slide a little bit easier but there is definitely some friction metal on metal there that depending on the angle makes it a bit rough to try and pull out so a few squirts of lubrication definitely assist in sliding it out but it's something you got to remember to do before you pull out the slide again every rig is different and I can't say whether you can or cannot do this I just wanted to show this example of how I did on my RV why I did it what I did and so with the industry standard of storing these Wastewater totes hanging off your ladder or setting on your bumper I wanted to add one more thing into the mix this is how I did it hopefully you can gain some inspiration from it and with that we'll see you down the road happy camping thank you

Channel: RV Gear & Far

Views: 69,703

Keywords: rv, rv living, sewer hose, rv life, full time rv, rv mod, rv modification, rv sewer, rv sewer hookup, rv sewer storage, rv portable waste tank, rv waste tank mount, rv diy, rv blueboy, rv portable black tank, rv black tank, rv grey tank, rv wastewater, rv portable tote, Camco Rhino Tote Tank, Stor a tote, Barker Totealong, Sewer Tote, Portable Camper Tote Tank, Camper Waste Tank, RV Tote Tank, Portable Waste Transport, RV living, rv tips, rv travel, rving, rv gear

Id: xWyNdBC0dj4

Length: 11min 50sec (710 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 23 2023