Comparing Tank Flushers in the Clear RV Black Tank

good afternoon waste fans to James once again from the Fedora V gum I'm here with another black tank show now for those of you who saw my first experiment you kind of know what this is about but for those of you who may not have basically I've got a clear black tank and I'm going to test some products here today we're going to be testing some tank rinsing solutions so harkening back to my first experiment and if you haven't seen it will put a link right up here oh really pause okay I have a link um I got a number of comments on my first experiment about things I could improve and so I've taken some time to make some improvements I'm going to go over those first before we jump into the experiment first I had a number people suggest that I may have gotten different results if I had a covered tank with a vent stack well I got busy with my clear plastic and I fashioned a cover it fits on sort of snugly like that we go it's not many exactly airtight but it's enough so that it will provide decent flow restriction and I even put a little RV vent cover thing on the top so there we go I have a tank cover um the second critique I got was that you know a straight shot back into the back into the black tank that creates a pretty ideal solution for a lot of tank printers but most of us don't have that so there's no way I can test everyone's plumbing combination it's pretty easy for me to prevent a straight shot back into the tank the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to use a couple of clear elbows like this or 45-degree elbows and since my tank just has an attachment like that attach them on right like that boom Oh straight shot back into the tank and that will be used for all the different runs the next thing I got and this really probably is an issue but a number of folks said that my water pressure was ridiculously high and it is is 120 psi so for the drums today we've got an RV water pressure regulator is made by can go and I'm going to be using that and testing the pressure before each run on the next thing number people said you cut the toilet paper into dainty little strips my wife doesn't use toilet paper that way point taken um so instead of 40 strips or 40 sheets cut into strips this time I'm going to cut 20 sheets of toilet paper into strips I'm going to take 20 sheets and just kind of tear them up in five sheet chunks and then I'm going to take 20 sheets in five sheet watts and just wad them up and put that all into the tank so that's what I'm going to do there the next suggestion was you know people wanted to know more about how exactly I conducted the experiment so I'm going to make I've made actually already a test run sheet and I'm going to use that you know to mark down times and temperatures and that sort of thing and I'll make that available on the web page that will have this test on it so beyond that I'm going to run the test pretty much the same way I did last night with my same standard mixture of simulated waste at being mostly peanut butter cornmeal rice krispies and other food products with a bizarre food coloring and I think I'm going to go blue today um so with that the four products were going to test today I'm gonna make four runs and please bear in mind I'm only testing the rinsing performance the tank rinsing of these four different products I know there are other benefits like the sewer solution you have a very clean hose etc I'm not testing that just the rinsing so with that said the first thing I'm going to test just like I did last time is the sewer solution the next thing I'm going to test is the art of the hydro flush this kind of goes on flushes out the tank that way there's another product that would work really well with a straight shot into the tank but we don't have that anymore I'm going to test that next thing gonna test is the flesh king which I actually don't have so the flesh king really is nothing more than this with a valve attached to it that you can actually close off the tank and kind of start filling the tank so I didn't buy the flesh game because I already had a removable valve but this and this is basically the same thing as the flush cake and then the final product I'm gonna test is the tornado rotary tank printer now that required a little prep time you see but I've already got it installed on to the under the black tank and we're going to use that as the final run of test now I wanted to have a common rinsing procedure so I looked at the manufacturer recommendations for all these the only ones that really had any recommendations were the sewer solution and the tornado and tornado has said rinse for two minutes or until clear and the sewer solution can even really give it time so what I'm going to do is I'm going to have a two minute rinse cycle so I'm going to rinse for two minutes let it drain for two minutes and then repeat and I'm not going to do that any more than two times because I could sit there all day and maybe eventually get the tank completely spotless but that's kind of not the point so with that said I need to go get to making some fake waste and then we'll get started so we're set up to run the first experiment using the sewer solution I've added the standard stuff to the tank and I did it in an order which you will be able to see in the list but I added it in the order that I'm going to add the same thing each time we've got the water ready to go the tanks been sitting here for five minutes so I'm just going to hook up the water there we go get ready to time it turn on the water alright we've got water flowing down into the sewer solution and we're going to dump and go okay it's been about a minute and a half and we're I don't know about halfway done draining so we're going to keep letting it go we are still getting like we did in the last experiment we are still getting this film left on the side of the tanks from the slow emptying we'll see if that holds up when we start using the three inch hose for the other dump myth or the other clean methods it's a three minutes and this is pretty much run dry so we're going to turn the water off for a moment and have a look okay so we finished dumping with the sewer solution um with lid on and there's quite a bit of stuff left here in the tank some larger chunks of stuff and the sides are all covered with the film we even can see over here if you look you can see the the kind of problem that you get with the standard probe kind of tank sensors and that's that stuff gets stuck on them and we've had that happen here on the end of the screw that's on the tornado tank rinser so that's done so what we're going to do now is we're going to set up for rinse so now we're going to rinse using the sewer solution for two minutes so I'm going to turn on the water and I'm going to direct it back into the tank and I've got to lid this time so I'm not going to get covered and stuff okay now this is kind of important something that I'm noticing here with the sewer solution the sewer solution is that now that I've put a couple bends in the plumbing it's not really getting all the way back into the tank there's just a very little bit of water you can see starting to back up into the tank but it's nowhere near the forceful rinse that I had before it is filling up a little but nothing like it did the last time coming up on two minutes now I'm going to switch the sewer solution back to dump and what we can see here is that there is a still quite a bit of material left in the tank so even though it's not part of the test protocol I did notice that it was starting to fill up the tank slowly enough but after two minutes it hadn't even really gotten halfway full so I'm going to let it go another time for a full five minutes and then I'm going to call it on the sewer solution so here we go again okay it's been five minutes and something very interesting has happened so if you look here where the sewer solution is running you see just clear water and so if you were dumping your tanks and looking here or looking at the end of the sewer solution you would think awesome my tanks are completely clean nothing has come out of here in a while but with these bends in the pipe very little of the water has backed up into the tank and the reason for that is I think the first time some piece of material got law lodged in this in this discharge hose and allow the water to back up but that didn't happen this time and so since this hose is always open the water never is backed up into the tank so we've got this here looks clean but I'm going to shut it off and let's have a look in the tank so this is what's still left in the tank and this is after one two minute rinse and after one five minute rinse it's just not taking anything out of the tank because it's continuously discharging through the discharge hose at the same time while you're trying to fill the tank so that's as good as we're going to get with the sewer solution now that we've added a couple bends in the pipe okay so that's going to do it for the sewer solution and yuck I've got kind of a mess to clean out here so I'm going to clean this up and then we'll get started next with the RV hydro flush here we are we're ready for run - I've got the same mixture of stuff in the tank that I put in the exact same way so now I've got a three inch hose hooked up and I've got the RV hydro flush hooked up as well so we're going to dump with the three inch hose and then take a look and then we'll hit it with the hydro flush so here we go start and fire in the hole okay after dumping with a standard 3 inch hose this is what we have left and this is what the hydro flesh is going to be working against all the large floating material got out but the stuff that sunk to the bottom is still kind of sitting there as much muck down at the bottom alright it's time to put the lid back on and check out the Hydra flush so tanks emptied now we're going to hit it with the Hydra flush the water is already on I've got the vacuum breaker on there and this is going to work I my suspicion is it's going to work in much the same way that the sewer solution did and that it doesn't have a straight shot and the drain is open all the time that it's not going to fill the tank but we'll see here we go there's the Hydra flush in action but as you can see looking up into the tank not a lot coming back up into the tank so not much to speak of here with the Hydra flush although it is doing probably a fantastic job of cleaning out that a little bit of pipe but there we go okay and that's two minutes and once again if you were just looking at the Hydra flush or if you were looking at you know a clear section coming out of your your waste tank you would think wow my tanks are completely clean I am good to go and that's what it would be but if you come and look in the tank I mean you can see that maybe a little bit of water splashes up to there but really not much happens I could let this run all day and the tank would not get any cleaner than what it is right now which is I think we can all agree this is not quite clean so once again I have an awful mess to clean out of this tank and then we'll get going with the flush King okay and five minutes so we're ready for our third run and this one we're going to use the what's called the flush King but I don't actually have a flush King so I want to show you what I've done to simulate a flush King the big difference between the Hydra flesh and the flesh King is the addition of this blade valve now the Hydra flush doesn't have one the flush King does so I just basically reversed the order of where I had the valve and the Hydra flush and now I'm simulating flush King what this will allow me to do is it'll actually I'll be able to close the valve again and be able to fill up the tank while I'm using the flush so with that said it's time to dump so let me get rid of the time that and go and we're at about a minute in seven and that's pretty much drained all its going to drain so let's have a look at what's inside so the 3-inch valve is still open but at this point this is what we've got left in the tank that the the flush King is going to attempt to work on so with that said let's get ready to rinse so we're ready to have flush with the flush King simulator so I'm going to close the blade valve get ready to time it and run it for two minutes now come up here now you can see here this is already starting to back up into the tank so we're actually going to get some additional flushing action out of this setup so we're going to let it run for the rest of the two minutes and then we'll drain again okay there we are at two minutes and let's just pop the lid off for a second so we can have a look this is a 20 gallon tank and I'd say that's a good half to two-thirds of the way full after just two minutes with the flush King so something you're going to want to keep in mind if you're going to use it in this manner you're going to have someone inside to monitor the tank levels so you don't forget and absent-mindedly you know blow water out the wrong side of your toilet but let's open this up and have a look inside so this is what we've got to work with we're getting almost another full dump after just two minutes with the flush gang you're like a 2/3 dump so with that we're going to put the lid back on and we're going to dump again okay so it's been two minutes and then we dumped it again let's have a look inside you can see here that it's quite a bit cleaner than it was before there's still some larger I guess heavier stuff that it's a that it hasn't moved but by and large it's doing a better job of getting things out then maybe the other the other two that we've tried have so I'm kind of coming to realise that with the flush King you could actually if you left it on long enough you could actually get another complete emptying of the tank with the flush King and just for good measure I'm going to do that now just to see kind of what you could realistically expect you could keep doing this all day you get a little bit cleaner each time so I'm going to try a one hole fill and then we'll move on to the next one so you can put the lid back on and fill it up now we're still filling this tank again but I just want to point something out once again right here the water is so clear it's it would be very deceiving if you were using one of these clear connectors to judge how clean your tanks were because as we saw there's quite a bit of stuff still in the tank but this looks just crystal clear okay so it took about three and a half minutes for the flesh king or Hydra flush to fill a twenty gallon tank so I'm going to dump it again because what we've got here now basically this is my second rinse third dumping with this tank it's going to be almost a complete dump with the reasonably clean or cleaner water so here we go taking the lid off let's have a look this is about the best that it could get with the flush King type setup so it's getting cleaner and notice is going to continue to get cleaner with each successive rinse we still have this film kind of on the sides of the tank it's just kind of weird and I guess there's the other thing to note is there's some heavy larger material that's just stuck there on the bottom of the tank and and nothing's going to float it out so but all in all I'm going to say this is quite a bit cleaner than the first two things we tried and so now I have to clean the tank again and then we're going to get started with the the tornado and I'm kind of most excited about that because it's very different from the other ones so I got to get to work and now we're ready to try testing out the tornado rotary tank rinser this one works a little differently so I've just got like one little clear elbow on here so we can see what's going coming down the pipe but the rest of that stuff I don't need down there and I think everything set we're ready to go ahead and dump so let's do that now and I'll time it but I know it's going to take about a minute because I've done this four times already go okay so that took about 55 seconds and let's have a look and see what we've got to work with so here's the tank after being dumped with a three inch hose but before running the tornado rinser looks about like it did the other times there's a fair amount of paper sledge up here and we've got the tornado rents are mounted at the opposite end of the tank from the outlet as instructed about two inches down from the top of the tank so I'm kind of excited because I tried it before and it kind of sprayed around but I didn't try it inside the tank so kind of excited to see how this goes now one thing in the tornado winter instructions it says to only run it with the valve open so we're going to try that for two minutes or until the water runs clear as the instruction said and then we'll we'll try something else but for right now we're going to try it with the valve open so here we go three two one cool haha okay so that's been two minutes in the water is actually running clear before the two minutes was up but I let it go to two minutes and already before you even get in look in the tank look at the sides of the tank all the other all the other dumpings we had the sides of the tank were coated with this gooey greasy film and with the tornado that seems to have been largely rinsed away so now let's have a look and see how well she did on the inside this is a much better job than all the other solutions I think there's still some heavier stuff here things that saying I guess a lesson there is even more fiber there's still some material here towards the outlet but by and large this is the cleanest we've got from a product right out of the gate so I'm pretty impressed with the tornado now I mentioned that they said to only run the tornado with the valve open but seeing as we've got a clear tank and there's no danger of me over filling the tank I'm gonna actually close the valve and run it again just to kind of see what sort of result we get from filling the tank a little bit and then draining it again so I'm going to do that so let's get to it okay so one thing I've learned is that my lid is not watertight I don't know if that really matters because of getting water all outside anyway taking the time to fill the tank up most of the way with the using the tornado now I'm going to dump again and in about a minute we'll see how clean we got okay actually not a whole heck of a lot different than last I mean there's less stuff but by and large it's it's kind of about as clean as it was last time but still I'm going to say the performance of the tornado seems to be at least I I'll have to go back and look at the rest of the footage but so far this seems to be topping the field so with that we're going to call it a day here at the super clean-out let me go inside and have a look at the footage and wrap it up Thanks okay it's the next day I've had a chance to think about it to look at some of the footage and it's time to draw some conclusions but before I do that I want to show you four pictures these pictures represent the cleanest I could get the tank using each of the four methods that we test it now this is multiple flush and dump cycles so here we go first picture I'm going to show you is a sewer solution and yup I think we can all agree that's really not very clean at all second picture I'm going to show you is from the RV hydro flush and that's not really all that clean either third picture is from the flush King and now we can see that things are starting to look like you would expect after a tank rinse and the fourth one this is the tornado rotary tank rinser and that's really starting to look like something that you could probably live with so what kind of conclusions can we draw from all this well the first conclusion I'm drawing is that the plumbing configuration makes a huge difference in how well a tank rinsing system is going to work now if you've got a straight shot from your from your drain valve back into your black tank hooray for you but almost nobody does I don't even have that um if you've got even just a couple little 45-degree elbows as we saw in this video it really makes a big difference in how well you're going to be able to flush out the tank so first first conclusion is everyone needs to crawl under their RV and know what sort of plumbing they've got leaving the drain second conclusion is that if you've bought a clear section to add on to your drain waste plumbing it's probably lying to you and all the runs we did we saw that the water in the clear section was showing clear well before the tank was empty of stuff so if you've got a clear section added on to your drain plumbing don't trust it um the third conclusion is it the drain and flush systems the ones that don't have a valve to allow you shut off the flow of water out of the tank those are pretty much worthless um unless you've got a straight shot back into the tank what we saw is it without being able to shut the flow out of the tank off they just kind of rinse out the few inches of pipe right near the drain and lead you to believe that your tank is clean when it's not again straight shot back into the tank changes things um fourth conclusion is that even the drain end systems that allow you to shut off the flow into the tank like the flush king or the flush gang simulator that's really no more effective in my opinion then just filling your tank in any other way you could sit there with a with a hose and just pour water into your toilet and the flushing performance you're going to get from that is going to be pretty identical to what you're going to get from the flush gang so if you're fortunate like like we are and you've got a bathroom lavatory that's plumbed into your black tank use that as a way to fill the tank safe the money don't bother with the with the flushing systems um fifth conclusion is if the tornado rotary tank rinser and I'm just going to by extension implicate all installed in the tank rinsing systems that's the only one that did a decent job at all especially if clearing the walls of that film that was on them and all all the runs had like this greasy film only the tornado got that off so that's something to think about if you've got a installed in your black tank flushing system use it you saw what it does it does well and I guess the final conclusion I've got is if there's something in your tank that's heavy enough to sink to the bottom doesn't seem like any kind of flush system is going to get that out so that was kind of random you can maybe ignore those kinds of things that you saw on the test but that does lead me into what I believe is going to be my next test and that's going to be a tank additive something to break up the waste and help make it easier to remove so with that I'm going to sign off see you next time so James from the photography bye you

Channel: The Fit RV

Views: 1,082,197

Keywords: RV, TheFitRV, FitRV, The Fit RV, Fit RV, The Sewer Solution, RV Hydroflush, Flush King, Tornado Rotary Tank Rinser, Black Tank, Clear black tank, Tank Flush, Tank Rinse

Id: dfTd0Slt_cU

Length: 25min 56sec (1556 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 11 2014