Have I ever mentioned.........

I feel your pain. I never enjoy plumbing.

Ha! Funny that you bring this up now. We've been living in the camper for a week while my wife's brother's family are staying in our house. Everything was going well until yesterday when I got a call that the kitchen sink drain had backed up. "No problem, I thought...I'll just go pour some stuff down and maybe plunge it. Back to the shop in 1/2 hour." Wrong. Spent half the day disconnecting fittings and snaking thru cleanouts to no avail. Finally had to call a plumber friend to rescue us.

Ever have a plumbing snake suddenly come slithering out of the nasty pipe, covered in slimy yuk, splattering all over you and your surroundings? What a stinky mess! We finally got it cleared out, only two more nights in the camper and we can go home.

Good news is that we have found that we can easily go for a week without any hookups. Even with less than full days of sunlight, our 15 watt solar panel has been able to maintain the battery at almost a full charge ( we have two 100 amp deep cycle batts), but have only been running off of one. For those of you who are unsure about propane, we are comfortably warm with an Attwood furnace, food and drink kept cold in the Norcold refrigerator, and two propane lamps for light. LED lights are really nice and draw almost nothing from the batts. The furnace does draw 10 amps but really only runs for a few minutes a few times each hour. We only use it while cooking supper, before bed and for a short time in the morning. Also bought a really cool lithium battery power pack to run AC things like laptops, etc. It has 500 watt capacity, is about the size of a loaf of bread. I thought it must just be a toy, but the thing is awesome. This is a link to a similar product, not cheap, but very useful.

www.amazon.com/Uninterruptible-LNSLNM-UPS-500AD-Alternative-Rechargeable/dp/B06WRXDK9K/ref=pd_day0_263_11?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B06WRXDK9K&pd_rd_r=9DP3RC3CWE0YMFWND2N5&pd_rd_w=tTCGM&pd_rd_wg=kyUXW&psc=1&refRID=9DP3RC3CWE0YMFWND2N5

Hello Cow, thanks for bringing that up. I never actually tested it, somewhere I thought I read that it was 10 amps. I stand corrected 3 to 4 seems to be the norm, which is excellent news and helps explain why my batteries don't discharge as much as I had expected. It is an Attwood Hydroflame, not vintage that I got for $100 from a guy who parted out an '80s pop-up. Really amazing little furnace, puts out a lot of heat. Don't like the blower noise, but do like that it is fully vented. Noise isn't really an issue since we generally shut it off while sleeping.

Ya but wires don't leak... And now, if you use pex tubing for plumbing, they DO have different colors. Red for Hot and Blue for Cold. I really like that idea myself.

The two different colors make trouble shooting easy. No tracing out the line all the way from the water heater to see which one is hot.

My house was built in '68.  I'm guessing that's about the time CPVC started gaining popularity around these parts (S. Indiana).  Believe it or not, the hot & cold CPVC lines are different colors, like Larry stated, blue for cold and in this case, orange for hot.
Go figure...

I've done two gravity tanks and they aren't "great". The water flows slowly even when the tank is higher above the faucet. On my Aljo, I added a small booster pump and it worked great. Just an inline boat item, about the size of a lemon. I'm sure it will not last a long time.