Another day of Winterizing

Even more RV winterizing fun. Today it was South to Melvern Lake here in Kansas. This is where my older son stores his 26 Foot Salem. It still had a full complement of water in all tanks.

Since it is now 33 degrees as I write this, and it is likely to be 26 by morning, it was not optional to eliminate the water from his rig.

We arrived and immediately opened all the valves, on the fresh water tank and the big drain plug in the bottom of the waterheater. Water ran like crazy. Around on the other side we opened the sewers, since we were in a farm field, and the small amount that came out would not hurt anything.

Next we took the access panels off of the cabinets where the water heater and fresh water pump were located inside. Studying the plumbing, we couldn't see how the valves would work. We talked it out between us and still decided that the valving was backwards.

Since this is a brand new 2008 trailer, and has never been winterized before, we thought that we might have been wrong and just didn't understand the plumbing.

The water heater had the usual stop valves on both the input and the output lines, and had the bypass line with the valve in the middle, and it was off as it should have been. BUT, and this is the thing we couldn't understand, the bypass was between the water heater and the shutoff valves. Once you closed the input and output shutoff valves the bypass was on the wrong side.

We couldn't believe what we were looking at. Somebody at ForestRiver installed this thing on a Friday afternoon, thinking he needed to be home, or not thinking at all.

We decided we needed to make our own bypass from flexible plastic tubing and some NPT threaded ends. Removing the lines completely from the bypass network and connecting the red hot line directly to the blue cold line. This left the original piping intact, for the eventual trek back to the dealer for our proposed warranty work.

Once we drove up to Topeka, about 60 miles each way, and went to the ace hardware store for the necessary tubing and ends to thread into the system, it was back to the original job.

Once we installed our hose bypass, the antifreeze went right in without a problem, and was pumped to all faucets. We ran some in each drain trap and even opened the bypass valve at the fresh water input on the back of the unit. The pump smartly shot the clear water out of that line too. Once it ran pink, we let the valve shut off by pulling the screw driver back out of the hose coupling.

Driving the hour and a half back to Olathe, it was almost 8 PM when we got home. Still wondering if we didn't understand the bypass, or it truly was installed upside down.