We spent nearly a full day at the Quartzsite Sports, Vacation & RV Show last week while we were at the Xscapers Convergence. The “Big Tent” at the show is full of hundreds of booths with vendors hawking gadgets for RVers: flagpoles, decorations, tow bars, tire pressure monitoring systems, LEDs, solar panels, folding chairs, and more, as well as a healthy dose of state fair-type wares like mops, cookware, dip mixes and essential oils. And out of all this cool stuff, what was the first thing we bought?
A new toilet.
Yes, that’s right. A commode.
It was far from the most exciting thing at the show. But on the other hand, we had not been too happy with the low-profile Thetford toilet that was original equipment on our Landmark. Even though the bowl was porcelain, the seat and lid were rather flimsy plastic. The seat was more or less round, not elongated like you find on most residential toilets. When flushed, water was dispensed only from the back of the bowl, leaving much of the rest of the bowl untouched unless we filled it with water first–a wasteful proposition, especially if you’re conserving water while dry camping. (RV toilets don’t have a water tank; they flush by allowing some water into the bowl with a foot pedal, and then pressing the pedal all the way down so that gravity pulls the contents of the bowl into the RV’s holding tank.) And the toilet bowl was quite shallow, leading to…um…an occasional unfortunate encounter with the contents while using the commode.
Who said RV full-time living isn’t exciting? 🙂
So at the Dometic booth, we began learning about options to upgrade the toilet. With the knowledgeable help of our new Xscapers friends Jeff and Deb, who work for Dometic while they’re on the road, we quickly settled on the Dometic 320 series gravity-flush toilet with hand sprayer. It’s the same height and elongated shape as a residential toilet, so the bowl is deeper than the Thetford. The seat is wood, not plastic, again like a residential toilet. And when flushed, it dispenses water in a swirling action all the way around the rim, cleaning the bowl much more effectively, with an integrated hand sprayer to efficiently clean any waste that remains.
Jeff assured me that that the installation was easy. So we proudly loaded our new toilet into the bed of the truck and hauled it back to our rig. Sure enough, it was a pretty simple process to remove the old toilet and install the new Dometic. This video shows how we did it, step by step:
Great work, and such a calm reaction when the leaking started. I feel like I could do this when need be.
LOL, thanks Lisa. We edited out the part where David’s reaction to the leak wasn’t quite so calm. 🙂
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