We Have Ignition!

Another great milestone was reached with Kadydid on Tuesday! 

Several people here, experienced RV’ers all, had offered to hold my hand while I light the hot water heater.  It was just put in a few weeks ago at RV Dr. George’s repair shop.  They showed me there how to light it, but I couldn’t help having visions of fiery explosions and mushroom shaped clouds of steam rising over Slab City, so I kinda procrastinated about lighting it until my campmates arrived and I was desperate for a shower. 

There were other tasks that needed to be done besides lighting the heater.  I had a bypass valve put into the water system so I could run a hose out the service bay and into one of my 55-gallon drums from Burning Man.  Since KD only has about a 28 gallon tank and it’s not easy to fill out here from jerry cans, I thought the external tank idea would be perfect for Slab boondocking.  Most long term campers out here have a water tank, and there’s a guy who will come and fill it for a fee.  But since I already had the drum and plenty of experience drawing from it with a 12-volt demand pump to supply a sink and hose bib out in the desert, I decided to do the same thing again with KD.   Dr. George’s crew installed a bypass tee, usually used for winterizing RV water systems by providing a port to draw antifreeze into the system.  In this case I won’t be using it for that purpose, but it works just as well for taking water from an external source.

Every time you have plumbing connections you have an opportunity for leaks, so all that had to be checked and tightened after attaching the freshwater hose to the bypass.  Then my campmates wanted the barrel water to be filtered.  We won’t be drinking that water, just using it for bathing and dish washing, but still.  So we had to partly disassemble things and put the filter inline.

I’d already filled up the barrel myself before my campers arrived.  The indispensable and redoubtable Seann topped off my trailer tank and put about five gallons into the barrel for me to get me started.  He has a 45-gallon bladder tank that he puts into the bed of his pickup truck, fills at the rest stop or the free Niland source, and then uses a 12-volt pump to transfer it to his trailer tank and to the tanks of whoever else in our little compound need water (he’s very community-minded that way).  His set up is clever.  He has the pump wired to a standard 7-round plug that he can just plug into the trailer hitch electrical receiver on his tailgate to power it.  Then he has a hose with a valve on the end so he can easily turn the water on and off at the end of the fill hose.  When he is done and the bladder is empty, he folds it up and it goes back into a little box.  It’s a very good system for out here, and I plan to do something similar eventually, although in my case I’ll probably use a hard-sided custom tank in the back of the Goose, since I don’t like the idea of the vinyl bladder tank failing and turning the back of the Goose into a swimming pool.  A polypropylene tank could be left in place and drawn off from the bypass hose in the trailer as well, if I didn’t or couldn’t transfer the water to the external drum.

Here’s the auxiliary water takeup line and valve tee off the pump in the service bay, and the hose coming out from under the door of the bay and going into the tank.  That's the brand new door of the new water heater right above the service bay door.

 

The pump draws off this 55 gallons very happily, and it is relatively easy to fill using 7-gallon containers or cooler melt water (which is at last not getting wasted!).

When all that was set up, somebody had to crawl under the trailer and attach gray water hoses to route the used water into a bush.  That’s how things are done here, although people who are here longer have what they call a “gopher hole.”  That is either a shallow trench they dig and cover with a board, or an existing animal burrow or other hole.  Some people are lucky and savvy enough to find the remnants of the old marine base septic system.  It is still there, sort of, covered over by wooden hatches wherever there were access points.  The amount of effluent a few RV’s would discharge into those miles of pipes leading out to the old leach fields is easily accommodated by the underground system.  It will peacefully and safely decompose there and not trouble anyone or anything.

Because we are here for only a short time, we don’t usually discharge any black tank contents while we are here, we take it off site to dispose of it.  But gray water, using biodegradable soap, is gladly received by the surrounding sparse vegetation and immediately disappears into the sandy ground.  

 

I was the one in best shape to wallow around under the trailer, since our youngest is battling a bad case of laryngitis and the senior member is dealing with bronchial asthma flare up.  So I got down there, not very gracefully, and grumbling and grunting, got the hoses attached.  KD had a skanky old garden hose in her when I got her, and I kept it even though I thought it wouldn’t be very useful.  I’m glad I did now, because it came in handy as the second gray water hose I needed.  Right now the shower and sink drain from separate outlets, so I need two hoses.

When all that was done, it was time to light the water heater.  It took several tries before I realized that the pilot was actually lit, because the flame is a tiny, translucent blue, and I wasn't looking in exactly the right place.  Once I realized it was lit, we turned the knob to warm and the burner lit with a roar.

"We have ignition!" I yelled to the various interested parties who were hovering in the middle distance.  I'd been talking about this for a few days and people were probably starting to think I was never going to gin up the courage to light the damn thing, but with my homeys at my side, I got it done (they wanted showers too, and were chivvying me along, which helped).

Then the shower curtain needed to be hung, which took longer than anyone could have expected, due to the weirdness of the little carriers strung up on the track.  Then it was time.   I was willing to pass on my first shower rights as captain of KD to the folks who had worked so hard to help me make it happen, but they insisted it should be me.  More on that in the next installment . . . .