What Is an RV Portable Waste Tank?
What Is an RV Portable Waste Tank?
A recreational vehicle or camper is like a home away from home. The difference between an RV and a second home is you can take it with you while you travel. Furthermore, the RV isn’t connected to the grid-like most homes.
The downside of this is that you aren’t connected to utilities in most locations. This is where water and wastewater tanks come in.
And you can add on to the existing capacity of the wastewater tanks that came with the RV.
The best RV portable waste tank allows you to wash your hands, do the dishes, and take showers just like you would at home with minimal inconvenience.
What’s an RV portable waste tank?
The typical RV has wastewater tanks for greywater and black water. Greywater comes from the shower and sink. Blackwater comes from the toilet. It is named for the dark human waste in it.
The average RV has one tank for each, though they may be connected.
For example, it is common to be able to empty the grey water tank into the black water tank after draining the black water tank.
This helps purge the black water tank without having to use additional clean water.
You can add to the capacity of one or both of these wastewater tanks with a portable waste tank. An RV portable waste tank may be called a black water expansion tank because it is generally used to increase the capacity of the black water tank.
Note that the same tank can be used to empty greywater, as well.
How does an RV portable waste tank work?
Blackwater tanks are designed to last seven to ten days of moderate usage by a family of four. This means you need to empty it into a dump tank roughly once a week.
That’s not a problem if you are staying in an RV park with a dump station.
This can be a problem if you are dry camping or spending a lot of time at campsites where they may not have dump stations.
This is a major problem if you have a family of six or eight staying in the RV, too. And RV portable waste tanks are the solution.
The RV portable waste tank is a container made for you to dump the black water into. They come in a variety of sizes, but they can often be used to double the amount of time you have before you need to empty the wastewater tanks.
A side benefit of a black water expansion tank is that you can empty the black water tank in the RV into it, take the expansion tank to the dump station, and leave your RV right where it is.
But how do you use a portable RV wastewater tank? You’d empty the main RV wastewater tanks into the portable wastewater tank just as you would into a dump tank.
Close the valve, disconnect the wastewater tank, and take the wastewater tank to the dump station, and empty it.
Then you can put it under the RV, put it on your trailer, or put it back in storage. You could also empty the grey water tank, use the portable wastewater tank to dump it into the dump tank, and then take another trip for the black water. Or it could be done in the reverse order.
The key point is that the portable wastewater tank allows you to empty the tanks in the RV. And these tanks cannot reach capacity if you want to be able to flush toilets, take showers or drain the sink drain in the RV.
RV portable tanks come in a variety of shapes and sizes.
This means you could buy one that could fit in the storage bay of your RV, be tied to the top of the vehicle, or get pulled on a trailer along with 4-wheelers and hunting gear. Some units can be lashed onto the ladder on the back of the RV.
There are a number of factors to consider when you buy one from the dimensions of the portable wastewater tank relative to your RV to whether or not you can move it by yourself.
