Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/09/19/my-life-on-the-road-shit-foun.html
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@SeamusBellamy You have a brave wife. Mine won’t have anything to do with the dumping of the tanks.
Yep, if you’re a newb to the world of dump stations, it makes a shitty job even shittier. And embarrassing as hell, with all the old RV people standing around laughing at you. I agree, those Rhinoflex hoses are good, definitely replace any old ones. Once you pull the valves to your holding tanks, it’s a serious flood of a very dense liquid. You don’t need the hose or the connections failing.
If you’re ever going to store the rig for a season, make sure those holding tanks get rinsed out real well, too. My technique is to fill them with water and dump them. Do that a few times usually does the trick. I’ve seen videos where people advocate for dropping ice into the tanks then driving around, which is supposed to scrub the inside walls, but I’ve also seen videos that show that it’s not really true. Just filling them, letting it soak for a while, then a quick WHOOSH, dump is good enough.
Oh, and the blue chemical stuff, well, it just makes your rig smell like toilet chemicals.
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Have you ever been mistaken for Heisenberg? 
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Many years ago when I used to work in the Film biz in Chicago, we would rent RVs (and their owners) when we would shoot a TV commercial on Location. It was the mobile office/latrine for the crew and office staff.
We usually rented from a couple of retired guys because they were always available and didn’t care about the hours. Getting paid for chatting up cute girls. No one ever really thought about how they worked things out because we didn’t have to; until we worked really late one night and had to show up really early on site the next day.
Everyone shows up to the new Location at dawn but the RV operator, lets call him “Harvey”, was nowhere to be seen and the RV was also not there. Harvey was also not responding to phone calls either.
Being the City of Chicago, we didn’t really have many places for an RV to dump their loads.
So Harvey apparently went down a Cul-de-sac and tried to dump his waste tank into a storm drain.
Neighbor alerted police and they arrested him.
We didn’t use Harvey for any future jobs.
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Simone Giertz posted a vid about the blackwater tank on her houseboat failing a while back, which gives another perspective on the joys of dealing with these systems:
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This made me decide to put a cassette toilet on my RV wish list:
https://www.thetford-europe.com/how-to-use-the-thetford-cassette-toilet/
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Pump and dump?
So, “Placing other people’s poop in your person is a piss-poor plan” but spraying your own all over your RV and your wife? I am pretty sure that’s not the recommended process for FMT. Could still be effective, though.
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The first time we dumped out tanks, it didn’t go so well.
That’s going into a song. A love song…
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Used to live close to a klong in Thailand. Houseboat? Stilt house? Never.
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Well, that’s definitely starting your “life in the road” series with a bang…but where do you go from here?
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Are you sure? I was on the fence as a first-time-buyer but I’ve never met an experienced RV owner who says they want a cassette toilet in their next vehicle.
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Thankfully, it was late in the fall and there was no one around to watch us bathing in our own brand.
My life’s story: literally and metaphorically.
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Fair warning: a casette toilet is nothing but a wee honey wagon in disguise. Considering that you have to hold it like a shit-filled baby (not that there’s any other kind,) you stand just as good a chance, if not better, of being covered in poop during a dump.
Additionally, a lot of parks frown on dumping them in their bathrooms.
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We’ve got a long of ground to cover. I’ll be talking about travel as I go, hardware and misadventures, whenever I have the time to put a story together.
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I could definitely hear the Man in Black signing that and the final line…
“Sometimes, you just have to be covered in shit to know what it’s like to roll in clover.” 
@SeamusBellamy, love these pieces about RV life!
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