Fresh water/grey water

[Rod-Kelly]

Hello,

We are new to the camper world. We have our camper on some property we own and winterized it ourselves last year. We came up to get the camper ready for summer and we put fresh water in the tank. But it appears most of t ran into the grey water tank! What step did we forget? Please help!

Thanks
Rod and Kelly Kincaid

 

[danemayer]

Hi Rod-Kelly,

How exactly did you go about adding water to the fresh tank, and how did you determine that most went into the great tank?

 

[Rod-Kelly]

Dan, I think we got if fingered out, we filled the the water tank and turned off all the faucets turned on the pump and the water heater. We waited about 15:00 for things to warm up for showers, we did not realize the out door kitchen sink was running( forgot to turn it off) so all our water was in gray tank. We turned everything off I put the rest of our water in tank ( approx 8gal) I turned the water heater on, we than smelt eletrical smoke found it coming from a black box under the hot water tank area next to the water turn off valve. Due to not have much water left we want to wait until we make it up again to trouble shoot. Do you think we burnet up the heater? Is there an easy way to tell? I think we ran it with no water in it. The second time around I checked the outside valve/drain and got water to come out but we maybe to late damage already done. I need to know if I can replace black box only and what is that black called and what does it do?
Thanks for your time!! Rod and Kelly

 

[JohnD]

I do believe that you have probably burned out the heating element.

I've never changed out one of those, so I'm not sure what is involved in replacement.

 

[danemayer]

If you have a Suburban water heater, and ran it on electric without filling it first, the element is probably burned out. It doesn't take long. But the usual symptom doesn't include smelling smoke from a nearby electrical box. So you may have something else going on. Be careful opening the black box. Probably a good idea to do so with shore power disconnected. And when working on electrical, a $20 non-contact voltage tester is a great tool to determine if 120V AC is present, without actually touching parts that might give you a shock. You can get them at just about any hardware store. Skip the $10 models.

If you have an Atwood water heater, their heating elements in the past have been more tolerant of running on an empty tank. So you may be ok.

After figuring out what's going on with the black box, if a Suburban unit, our owner-written Water Heater Troubleshooting Guide has some help on replacing the electric heating element.

You might also find some of our owner-written User Guides helpful. They're in this folder.