No water lines underneath my Big Country

Hey guys, So we finally got to do our walk through of our Big Country, and we are taking it home tomorrow. My brothers Big Horn has three water lines with valves hanging down through the underbelly of his fifth wheel. One line is fresh water tank drain, and the other two are low point hot and cold drain lines. My question is shouldn't the Big Country have this as well? Ours only had the one hose hanging down for the fresh water tank drain and no low point drain lines that I could see. Is that normal?
 

dbbls59

Well-known member
My 1012 Big Country does not have low point drains. Don't know when the quit using them.
 

jbeletti

Well-known member
hpripstein - what year is your brother's Bighorn? Been quite a number of years since we've had low point drains on them.
 
Its a 2015 big horn and we talked to him and there weren't any on his either. It was our friends jayco we mixed up the two underbellies! Thanks for all your help everyone, we noticed a problem with the hydraulic leveling lines during our walk thru yesterday so hopefully they will have everything fixed for us today so we can head back home. We were about to pull out of the lot when we noticed the problem so we got a little paranoid about other things we thought we noticed!
 

jbeletti

Well-known member
hpripstein - if you want LPDs (low point drains), these can be added fairly easily. You'd need:
- 2 ea 1/2" PEX Ts
- 2 ea short sections of 1/2" PEX pipe (maybe 18" each)
- 2 ea 1/2" PEX turn valves.

You'd pull down the underbelly, locate a hot and a cold line running say, to the kitchen sink and cut into those lines where they run horizontally. You'd add the Ts, PEX pipe and valves.

The one thing to be concerned with in doing this is if you EVER find yourself camping and the temps fall below freezing, these LPDs will freeze as they stick outside the underbelly. Once they freeze, the water in the vertical PEX line freezes and then the freezing continues horizontally along the length of the hot and cold lines. you'd probably lose the use of the kitchen sink first, then other items.

What some have done to their LPDs is shorten up the vertical section of PEX to put it ABOVE the underbelly, then created a flap where they could reach in, pull down a bit on the PEX section and turn the valve.

I've never tried to rotate them, but I'm wondering if a Sharkbite PEX T can be rotated after installation. If so, I could see a short section of PEX on the T with a valve, then rotate that down to drain and back up (90 degrees) to store.

Just some thoughts - I've never done any of this...
 

jbeletti

Well-known member
I removed the LPD on our Horn years ago to prevent the water lines from freezing.

Thanks for the feedback Bob. For the same reason you removed yours, this is why Heartland stopped adding them in plant 2 (LM/BH/BC) a number of years ago. Too many complaints of freezeups.
 
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