Water Pump Woes

The following item may be of interest to fellow A'vanners at some stage. Unfortunately we didn't have access to a good camera capable of taking a close-up shot to help us describe the problem.

Problem with hand operated water pump.

On a recent trip we were connected to the town water supply and everything seemed to be operating as usual until after several days we noticed a wet patch on the ground at the hose connection. On further investigation we found water trickling out of the overflow pipe of the water tank. Very strange since the water tank was empty when we left home! Turned out that whenever we ran water into the sink there was a flow-back through the 12V electric pump into the water tank. This is a problem that's easy enough to work around, but it could be a real annoyance on a long trip. We weren't sure whether it was a fault of the hand operated pump or the electric pump, so we contacted Mitch at Oasis Caravans for advice. As it turned out his advice was "spot on"! The flow back was caused by a small piece of plastic like material jammed in a valve inside the pump, and was quite easy to remove.

This is how it's done:

Undo the four pump mounting screws.
If there's enough slack in the two hoses connected to the base of the pump you're in luck because you can open the pump without disconnecting them (unfortunately luck turned against us at this point).
Disconnect the hose going to the water tank first then you'll be able to remove the other (town water) hose by unscrewing the nylon adaptor rather than disconnecting the hose itself. You'll need a large spanner (26mm ?) or a large shifting spanner. We found that we didn't need to disconnect the 12V wiring as there was sufficient slack in the wires.
Remove the eight screws on the underside of the pump and separate the base from the body of the pump being careful not to damage the fibre gasket. The valve in question is located at the point where the tank water enters the pump.
Carefully remove any debris under the rubber valve with a small pointed knife or similar object.
Re-assemble the pump, re-connect the hoses, check for water leaks and re-mount the pump.

While we had the pump dismounted we decided it would be a good idea in case of future water problems to replace the town water hose with a longer section. Fortunately we noticed the 10mm marking on the hose otherwise we would have gone off and purchased a standard 12mm water hose. Surprisingly several places we telephoned didn't stock the 10mm hose so we finished up getting it from our A'van Service Centre at Oasis Caravans.

We hope this story may be helpful to other A'vanners out there who may be unfortunate enough to encounter a similar problem.

Regards

John & Phyllis Gosbell