Table of Contents
Waste Storage Install Part 2
Well after some discussion, we are going the route of two different waste discharge valves. It just sort of needed to be that way. There was just no way we could get the required connections working the way we wanted them to be.
The biggest issue now is just the weight distribution of the tanks. We will just have to see what we can do about it. However, I think it is just going to be what it is.
Waste Storage Install Part 1
So we did not get as far as I would have liked on the conversion over my vacation. One of the biggest things we have to contend with is the actual frame of the trailer.
We putting the grey and black tank inside the trailer and going to build a platform that that the shower and toilet sit on top of them. One challenge has been the discharge, how do we hook it up. The drain pipes were not going to be in the right place, so we had to move the tanks around a bit.
Now the issue is we either need to combine the waste discharges together in a manner so that the do not hang low enough that it will not hit anything on some of the roads we want to take it on.
I am leaning towards two connectors one on each tank.
Waste Storage
One of the big things we have to think about for this conversion is waste tanks. We know that we want something to last a while.
One of the things I noticed about a lot of the trailer conversion I have seen is how many of them sort of exclude a shower and/or toilet.
If they have a toilet, then they do something like a cassette or compost toilet. Neither of those options were something the wife liked. If they had some sort of shower, a lot of them seem to just have a drain hole to the outside and no storage tank. That was not option for us either. While we do go places that you could drain somewhere outside, there will be places that we go that we can not.
So we have decided to install both a black and grey tank in our conversion. The trick is for the black tank, the toilet has to be over the black tank just like in normal travel trailer. And the next trick is going to how to install the tanks we did get. Right now the plan is to build a platform for the shower and toilet area and have the tank underneath that platform. Going to lose headroom doing that. I will have to sit down to shower but I should be able to manage.
The sink is the only place where we will have a separate small holding tank we can dump. We should be able to dump it either outside or in the shower or toilet.
Hopefully these plans will pan out. Will update in a future post.
Starting a Trailer Conversion
We have an old 5th Wheel RV that we have been using since May of this year. You can review our Travel Journal to see some of the places we been in the last six months.
In those travels, we came to one conclusion, the 5th wheel is just way too large for us. For us, it has some of the following shortcomings.
- Too Long to fit in some of the boondocking spots we wanted to go to.
- Tends to no like the rougher roads we use for boondocking. In some places we have bent our truck bed when the RV has touched it.
- A slide-out. We have found that we do not like it at all. One more thing to fail and if you wanted to discretely park somewhere overnight, you have to slide-out just a bit to acess the bedroom and bathroom area easily.
- Too much wasted storage space. Since we rarely slide-out all the way, the storage hidden by the slide becomes useless to us.
- Grey and Black Tanks too small.
- Stairs and more stairs. We did not like having to go up into the bedroom and bathroom via stairs. We like things on a single level.
We looked at small travel trailers and they pretty much had the following wrong for us.
- Really small Tanks for fresh and waste water.
- Bad layout
- limited cargo capability.
- really pricey for a new one
In the end, we decided that while it will be a lot of work, we will convert an enclosed cargo trailer to have the features we want. After some searching and looking, we found a 7×14 enclosed for sale. The person that had it, only used it a few times. It pretty much was brand new.
I will post more information about the conversion when we do more.