water tank over flow

[JohnLori]

Well, we're having fun now! We've been on the road for a couple weeks now with our share of challenges.

Here's the question of TODAY: I accidently left the water on "tank fill" and our friends camping next door, luckily, noticed the tank was overflowing. Not only was water coming out the over flow spout, but the bays flooded! What's happening? Does this mean our tank is cracked on top? Or is there some other tube or something that goes in the top that could be leaking, or what?

TIA for any advice...

[Old Scout]

You could have split a seam on the tank or more likely [and hopefully] you just popped a connection on the fill or vent/feed/drain pipes. You have one fill pipe [rear-top of tank], two vents pipes [one front and one rear/both on top of tank], a large drain pipe [front-bottom of tank], and of course the feed pipe to the water pump [rear-driver side-bottom of tank]. You will just have to look at each of the pipes/ connections.....good luck

[RRTraveler]

I'm not sure where the water is coming from. However, I discovered that the overflow tube on my coach is not sized large enough to overcome the volume and pressure of the water coming in. In my case what I noticed is that the tank began to bulge because the overflow could not relieve the pressure fast enough.

I concluded that these tanks are definitely not made to be pressurized and if left unattended during filling, depending on the pressure of the water source, they may burst or at least develop a leak. Good luck with finding your leak.

[Algoma]

Make sure you always use a pressure regulator on your water connection.

[jerry davis]

Not to hijack a thread but my question does fit to some degree.........I have never used a regulator on my input water source and have measured input pressure from 30psi to 115psi. Never had a problem with the coaches ability to handle this wide range of pressures. Is there an maximum psi that the system is rated for?

[EngineerMike]

Jerry- if you ran your tank at 115psi, I'm pretty sure you would have noticed some irregularities. Probably that was with the selector valve set to City Water.

At speeds above 60 psi, there is usually some leakage thru those cheap selector valves. So if set to City Water, you were probably leaking at a very slow rate past the selector valve to fill the tank. Something of a drip rate, but measurable over time. If you filled the tank to the top @ 115 psi, and it didn't have any outlet, I'm pretty sure the tank would find an exit for you.

[bigfish]

At factory pick up, I asked the question as to what max pressure the water system was designed for, Izzy's answer was that 100 psi was max rating. Most systems would have a fudge factor to allow more but I would not trust anything over 75 psi. I base this on the fact that our coach came with the ShurFlo Smart Sensor 5.7 Extreme series pump with a 65 psi cutoff pressure.
BTF
05 40FDQS

[Mule Skinner]

My 2004 water in fill connection has a plastic “pop” restrictor. I found this after hooking up with out a regulator and what seemed like a half hour of filling I had almost no water in the tank. I disassembled the connection fitting and found this little plunger popped. What this did was block the incoming flow. I popped it back into place, added my regulator and all was fine.
The hose hook-up valve has a plastic pipe added to the back side and runs to the diversion valve, house or tank.
And, yes the tank over flow set up sucks!

[SteveS]

Mine came with a built-in regulator at the input nozzle. The regulator is not visable but built into the filler. I thought all Alpines had this. My first guess would be that a fitting in the overflow, drain, or supply lines are leaking.

[JohnLori]

Thanks for all the input. Once we get to New Orleans and unload our son's stuff out of the basement, we'll check it all out. Right now the basement is FULL and if we unloaded it, we'd probably never get it back in! haha! Luckily its all in plastic bins instead of cardboard boxes. I'll keep you posted on what we find.

[JohnLori]

Well, we finally got to crawling around in the storage compartments (hey, we're on mañana time here in Zihuatanejo) and found the tank-leak culprit: the rear vent line had apparently never been screwed into the top of the water tank!

The threads in the tank appear to be good, but the elbow was just sitting there—one end attached to the tubing that heads off aft somewhere, but the other end just resting on top of the tank. When the tank was more than about half-full, water sloshed out. A surprisingly lot of water from just a ½" hole.

We sure are glad we didn't crack the tank, which is the real lesson here.

Does anybody know where the aft vent goes? It looks like up through the floor in the vacinity of the kitchen...

[F&D ABQ]

John, glad you didn't split the tank - you'd have had to buy something expensive for Lori. Roses would not have sufficed.

On my '01 34' the tank vents just forward of the left rear wheel. The easy way to find out, of course, is to screw on the elbow and refill the tank --

Frank H.

[Jim A]

Mine is in front of the left rear wheels too. Look under the coach and you will see the 1/2" plastic pipe which will probably have a brass fitting at the end, with a filter screen in it. There should be one just like it in the front closer to the center of the coach, near the propane tank.

[F&D ABQ]

Someone (an Alpine driver, of course) suggested drilling a small hole in the top of the front overflow tube above the tank. I've not tried that for two reasons: that location is nearly inaccessible, and some of the overflow water would then go into the compartment. But one could insert an anti-siphon fitting there. No need for an elaborate up-and-down routing. Me? I put a valve at the bottom of the tube and so far have remembered to open it when filling the tank.