Throw Away Your Sewer Hose? - Thetford Sani-Con Turbo Installation & Detailed Review

hey guys Eric come living light here we don't know what this is this is our camco 15 foot traditional sewer hose it's actually been great but we've had it for just about two years and it stinks we've got a solution with a sent to us by Thetford that we're going to test out right now that supposedly is gonna help us get rid of this so before we get into the nitty gritty let's get rid of this take off our gloves and tell you a little bit about what's been going on so we haven't had our RV or our buffs for almost six weeks it needed new front tires a bunch of other stuff our radiator was leaking so that's why we haven't been posting obviously because of that we've got a huge backlog of stuff and reviews and other things to do we're actually here in our family shop up in Connecticut so we thought it'd be a great time to start to get through some of the backlog before we get started on the separate product we want to show you today a couple quick things we've got this awesome mobile router by pet wave a new model that's ultra small portable a really good entry price point and this has the new advanced modem that supports the LTE advanced functionality Verizon AT&T unlimited options on our store we'll be talking about you can message us for that it's a nifty 4G MIMO antenna that's roof mountable for a lot of time we've devices that's common I don't know how to say this SEO company is pretty cool looks like it does a bunch of pie and faucets and a bunch of discount votes for you guys if you're interested in replacing your faucets in your RV with upgraded kit some CB radio stuff other stuff water filtration systems all sorts of stuff I'm gonna get this all cleared off and we're going to get to the main event but make sure to subscribe for all of these future videos okay got everything cleaned off a little bit looks a little bit nicer here and we're gonna get into this new product from that firm before we start why haven't we looked at any upgrades to this traditional product and the three years that we've been full time to be honest it's because it works and there hasn't been any alternative that has done really what we wanted it to do up until now we think traditional sewer hoses they're inexpensive you can get them just about anywhere when they're gross and stinky you just throw them out and replace them and they they work pretty well on the downside you've got to put caps on there they're gross and stinky as I said before sometimes they're too short sometimes they're too long you need gravity for them to work properly and they're gross and stinky did I say that so enter bedford's answer it all now now this is called the Santa con turbo 600 thank you to Andy and the folks over at Deptford for sending us one of these they did send it to us free of charge in exchange for doing this video but you know that's not gonna that's not gonna make us recommend it or not we're gonna tell you guys what we think about it because we gotta live with it so this isn't our first macerator if you've looked at any of our videos on our channel you might have seen us use our flow jet which is a portable macerator that uses a garden hose for evacuation we've had it for two-plus years we've been very happy with it when we needed to dump uphill or when we were at home and we had to go long distances to get to a clean-out etc that's been a good option but the challenge has been that the vast majority at the time we didn't want to spend the time to hook that up and also just carry around a garden hose that specific use was for dumping it was kind of you know god forbid we ever mixed up our hoses so it's been sort of a emergency use only product but the reason why we haven't looked at any of the macerating systems that are on the market right now as a permanent solution has been because most of them have had a couple major drawbacks one of the top reasons why we haven't switched to a masquerade some up until now has been speed and noise those are kind of bundle those into one thing the mass rating systems are very noisy and their in a situation where I can pull a gray lever and black lever separately and dump tanks in you know less than a minute you know go to a Maps rater and we're talking five six minutes in most cases to dump so you know it's just a lot of time added along with a lot of noise especially if we want to do this late at night or early in the morning the second major drawback that we found is that most of these mastering systems on the market don't have an effective great water bypass what that means is that when you're camping you're not running the mass rating system your gray tank fill up now some of the systems including thetford old version did have a rail water bypass but it was an afterthought it's the only word I can really think of basically like a tube that went around the pump and let gray water bypass that's very prone to things getting clogged and too just not working reliably and if I'm going to install a system that's kind of essentially designed to help me not have to touch a bunch of dirty products all the time having to disassemble a macerator to fix it or unclog it all the time it's not gonna save me any time so we've pretty much stayed away from mass runners but we've kept our eye on them hoping that some company will come along and build something better so that proclaims they've done and they've done it not by doing what most people do which is hobble together a bunch of components that are kind of found off-the-shelf they've actually done it through research and development and through designing and developing a custom solution now what I really like about this an econ 600 product line is they've developed a bunch of different versions they've developed a portable version that can you know be moved from RV to RV they've developed a version that is sort of semi-permanent for Class A vehicles that have enough space for a hose that's the one that we have here and a bunch of different other options that we'll list in the full article listed below so beckford claims they've sold all of these challenge and I think kind of the key or the heart of that solution is this which is a high-volume macerating pump that operates with a standard inlet but a larger outlet and incorporates inside of this pumping system that gray water by pops that I'm talking about will it work I don't know that's what we're going to find out but before we get into that let's do a complete breakdown of all the parts that are included in this box we've got our instructions our electronics and heavy duty switch on/off looks like 12-gauge wire we'll get into electrical shortly I recommend a heavy gauge wire control to run that pump from your main house batteries really heavy-duty adapter kit this is going to adapt us from our traditional bayonet fitting onto that pump this feels really solid I like this clear elbow here a really nice touch so you can troubleshoot any flow issues mounting system I guess screws clamps here I'll put the exact length of the included hose down here feels pretty strong I know that that pretties mentioned that to me at least they've had some issues with this hose this is an upgraded hose that feels pretty good this is not like a vacuum hose this feels like it's definitely reinforced and marketing sticker winterization instructions that's a nice touch so that if you got a winter as your pump you know how to do it and contact information and serial number before we get too far down make sure that you get yourself a really nice heavy gauge wire to control this mass rating system if you're thinking of doing this project yourself this is a marine grade power wire that we use it's a 10 gauge wire 10 gauge each on the the positive and on the ground wire this stuff's great and you can even go with the 8 gauge or bigger if you've got long distances to run depending on where your batteries are all right welcome to our wet Bay setup here we've got a couple upgrades in here that we're going to discuss in future videos the biggest one being that we have a touchscreen control system we installed using a Raspberry Pi back-end we wrote all the code in Python for that that gives us the ability to open and close our valves turn on our rinse system with this electronic valve control and deal with our our black tank and also control our macerator so what that means is we're not going to be using the switching system that came with the Thetford to turn on and off the system we still will put a full explanation of how to wire in the Thetford system with the existing switching the instructions are very detailed and it's super simple and straightforward you plug two of the wires into the battery and two of the wires and the pump and you're done so it's very easy but stay tuned for future videos on some of this you can also control our system using your cell phone which is pretty cool so open the tank close the tank we'll be careful using that because you want to make sure this stuff is supervised when you're using it to avoid any messy accidents so we're gonna get our rinse hose here that we use to wash off our coach and clean our windshield and whatever else we can get out of here it's pretty tight quarters we're going to put up some cameras hopefully you can see what we're doing and get this sucker install [Music] all right we got our electrical installed forecast was for sunny skies today if you're weatherman's better than mine make sure you think I'm the next time you see him we're gonna put we're gonna wait for the rain to stop and then start putting the connecting all the hoses and give her a test [Music] all right fast forward two weeks guys we're at a campground here and we've got full hookups so we want to test this system and see just how fast this new SantaCon 600 system really is I got a stopwatch here and our black tank is currently at 82 which is pretty much when we normally dump we've got I think a 40 or 45 gallon tank I think it's a 40 black tank in this so we're gonna hit the timer close our gray open our black and we'll let you know when it's empty we're about thirty seconds still going sounds like the pump is moving moving pretty quick we're at one minute and our tanks are showing 29 so it's pretty fast I think it might be done in less than another 30 seconds [Music] all right we just heard the tanks empty out the hoses retracting I've got about a minute and 40 seconds here but I think it took me about 10 seconds to get it started it's just finding a little bit at the end of the tank here so 90 seconds in the two weeks we've been using the system we've been using the greywater bypass system and we have to say we're very impressed we've been leaving the gray system open doing laundry dishes etc and the pump has had no issues the water is basically flowing right through as if we were using a standard three and a half inch sewer hose and everything is it's just working great we're really happy with that feature now one thing that we didn't film in this video but we did actually try was dumping using the SantaCon 600 connected to a standard garden hose and as we said before you'd basically install this cap and then at the end you hook up your garden hose and that did work and it worked very well and it did dump very quickly as the manufacturer describes pretty much the only drawback I'd say is that there is no hookup for a rinse system to rinse out the hose after you've dumped the tanks if you look at our flow jet here which is our portable macerator we've got our waste out here where that's where everything goes to your clean-out or whatnot and then this is a hookup for a freshwater hose so after everything's done you can turn this valve on and rinse out all of the hoses with fresh water this system doesn't have that if you were gonna primarily use a garden hose for dumping I think that's pretty rare that's just for folks that may have a particular situation with a piece of property where they have to do that I'm not sure this would be the setup I'd go with I'd probably go with a flow jet but if you're just looking to have that garden hose functionality in a pinch this does work really well just make sure that you fill up your grey tank with some fresh water to clean off the system before you get started one last thing before we let you guys go set fir'd has as we said before said that they've you know really worked on this hose to make it very reliable and to ensure that it doesn't have any leaks especially because under a lot of high pressure a leak would be very unpleasant Integra has actually started installing this on all of these hoses coming out of the factory and what this is is it's actually four hydraulic hoses it's a nylon protective sleeve that goes over a hydraulic hose and protects it from abrasion I believe what Integra figured out is they use the same thing and they put it over the macerator hose and that gives the hose a little extra protection from sunlight and from just being on the ground day and night so we're going to install this we'll put full links of what the part numbers and whatnot are for this but thank you so much for watching we're so far very impressed with this product and we'll see on the road don't forget to follow us on Facebook and subscribe to our YouTube channel you can also subscribe to the blog directly on living life net and you'll receive email updates of all of our posts [Music] you

Channel: LivinLite.net

Views: 448,806

Rating: 4.1751208 out of 5

Keywords: living lite, rv sewer hose, rv macerator, macerator, sewer hose, camco, thetford, sanicon, sani-con, sanicon 600, tiny house, mobile home, sani-con turbo

Id: Qtpcl29Ln_s

Length: 16min 21sec (981 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 11 2018