Toilets are everywhere. Toilets are in houses, in apartments, in stores, in schools, in restaurants, in places of worship, in hotels, in theaters, on street in some places, at rest stops, and in Roadtreks! The toilet in Roadtrek is one of the big advantages of the Roadtrek when traveling or just taking the Roadtrek for a ride. If you have to go, you do not have to start looking for a rest area or someplace to stop that has a restroom. All you have to do is pull over, park, and get out of your seat and walk halfway back into the van and there is a toilet!
The Chevy Roadtrek came with two different types of "bathrooms". One is what Roadtrek called the "aisle bath". This consists of a door into an open space that is a little bit like a small closet in a house with a toilet inside facing the aisle and next to the toilet is a shower curtain that is pulled out along a track into the aisle for the shower that is there at the front corner near the ceiling of the aisle bath. With this style bathroom you sit with your legs and feet into the aisle. If you are showering you stand in the aisle with the shower curtain pulled around you. On the fiberglass floor in the aisle the floor is slanted toward the front of the van where under a plate that is removable along a open slot on the floor there is a drain that connects below into the grey waste tank (grey meaning just water and soap goes into it).
In the aisle bath there is no bathroom sink. Instead Roadtrek provided a heavy plastic molded bowl with wide rim that fits into the kitchen sink which is just opposite of the aisle bathroom that goes into the sink and lines up exactly and goes into the sink drain to use as a bathroom sink - designed in such a way that washing your hands from using the toilet kept all water and that which is washed off your hands so that it goes directly down the sink drain and never touches the inside of the sink - or the top rim of the drain. Since one is sitting in or showering in the aisle the door does open in such as way as to block the view to to your traveling companion in the front of the van. In earlier Roadtreks there was a half cabinet door next to the aisle bath that opened and the top blocked and a curtain that hung down from the bottom of the door to block the view from the back - or any window without a closed curtain. Our 2011 190 Popular did not have that back half cabinet door with curtain. The half cabinet door is there above but no curtain to block below. One can open the shower curtain. Meryl made a drape out of a black bed sheet cut down to size with magnets sewn into the top seam to attach to the shower curtains metal track on the ceiling with completely blocks the view from the back. But if one is traveling with a very close significant other - as I have said in prior articles - there is zero privacy inside a Roadtrek anyway - and you are not seeing anything that has not been seen before. 😉
The other style of Roadtrek bathroom which was first coming out when we first started looking to buy a Roadtrek in 1990 is a "private or permanent bath" This bathroom has a much wider closet which not only contains the toilet and the shower but also a sink inside the bathroom with plumbing connecting to the shower. It is possible to completely close yourself into the cabinet - though if one is claustrophobic it can be a bit UN-nerving. The door is hinged so that it can remain open. The private bath because it is longer along the aisle than the aisle bath does take away storage cabinet space resulting in less storage. I do not have a photo of the permanent bath (not sure why RT decided to call it a permanent bath as it is no more permanent than the aisle bath which is not going anywhere.
The toilets in an RV are not like the toilet you have in your home. The home toilet has a tank above the bowl to hold clean water that when flushed empties into the bowl and the bowl drain will carry the waste and the water in the bowl down into the house's septic system - either sewer or septic tank or cesspool. The RV toilet has no such tank above the bowl. When you step on the flush pedal centered at the bottom of the toilet base, that opens a valve which runs water from either your water pump or city water (water from a connected hose to a spigot outside) and at the same time opens a drain flap at the bottom of the bowl and washes the contents down the drain and into the black tank. Take your foot off the pedal and the flap closes and the water shuts off. Now - doesn't all of this SMELL??!!! No, there is a vent that goes from the black tank up through the Roadtrek wall behind the toilet and up through the ceiling and out the roof to vent any sewer gas - odor - out above the Roadtrek roof and away! There is more that one can do about odor - that I will go into later in this article.
OK so now you know about the two types of Chevy Roadtrek bathrooms but what about using them. Of course you know how to use them, but there are some Roadtrek owners who will not use the toilet in the Roadtrek bathroom regardless of the type. Some who use it will not flush toilet paper down into the black tank from the toilet bowl! Why? Older Roadtreks had a gravity dump system to dump (empty) the black (waste and water from the toilet - the black tank in the Chevy Roadtreks is 10 gallons) and water and soap from the grey tank. A gravity dump system relies on gravity to bring the waste from the waste tanks into a wide hose which is connected to a sewer hole at a campsite. The problem with a Class B RV like the Roadtrek is there is not much height off the ground for gravity to be strong enough to get the waste all out of the tanks. At some campsites the sewer hole is above on a small hill - there is not enough gravity to get the waste up the hill. So what does Roadtrek do? They started using a macerator. A macerator is an electric motor which pumps waste from the black and grey tanks into a smaller - one inch diameter hose and that hose is put into the opening of the sewer drain of the campsite and the waste is ground up inside the macerator by spinning metal knife blades and out the hose into the sewer hole. It takes just a few minutes to empty a tank instead of waiting for gravity to take its course. The macerator can pump up hill if need be. Sounds great - so why will some not use the toilet? Because the macerator if the right toilet paper is not used can jam or clog, Also the macerator can not cut up anything really solid - so one must be careful that objects are not dropped down into the toilet. The macerator can break - what breaks is the nylon impeller that spins to pump - and then it does not pump any more. It can be repaired but more often it is easier to just replace the macerator with a new one. One RV service tech at a dealer told me that the most common thing that they find inside macerators that have gone bad is hair. Hair goes down the shower drain - or sink drain - and gets into the macerator and wraps itself around the impeller and as it collects it jams the impeller preventing it from turning and burns out the motor. This is very much like what happens with a vacuum cleaner's roller that picks up hair and it wraps around the brush roller under the vacuum cleaner head.
Everyone can do whatever they please in this regard but I did not spend what I spent to buy the Roadtrek to not use the toilet or to collect dirty toilet paper in a plastic bag or a wood box on the wall (yes, I have read multiple times about the toilet paper box)! What goes into the toilet including toilet paper gets flushed into the black tank in my Roadtrek. Our macerator lasted 9 years before it stopped working. If you use the right toilet paper there will be no problem.
What is the right toilet paper. One can buy special toilet paper for RVs - it is expensive and while most does breakdown completely once in water, not all do. What we do is use Scott's home single ply toilet paper. A few sheets off the roll are strong enough to do a good clean up- and once in water it breaks down completely in a few minutes. (We are not paid by Scotts to feature their toilet paper - it just works well!) There is a test that one can do to test toilet paper for use in an RV. Take one sheet of toilet paper and put it in a clear glass of water. Stir a couple of times and wait. In a few minutes if the toilet paper is OK for your RV toilet the paper will have disintegrated to fibers in the water. If it does that use it. If it doesn't - don't use it!
To help breakdown the waste that goes into the black tank, there are RV toilet treatments that both break down waste and stop odors. There are many different ones. With the Roadtrek's macerator do not use one that comes in dissolving packets - as they do not completely dissolve and it will jam the macerator. You also do not want to use tablets for the same reason. The best thing to get is the liquid in a bottle. The bottles usually have a measuring guide along the side - or you can get a measuring cup to use to measure out the amount needed. Then after you dump if you are going to continue to travel right then with your Roadtrek or before you leave on a trip, you put this down into the toilet and flush it down into the black tank. I have found that the one that has worked the best is Camco TST RV tank treatment. It comes in different scents. The easiest scent to find is Orange as this is sold in most Walmart stores on the shelves in the auto aisles where they have RV supplies. There is also citrus - not as orange and there is "fresh scent".
For some time it was popular called the GEO Method to use a home made mixture of Borax powder dissolved in hot water and Dawn dish washing detergent followed down into the black tank with several gallons of water. We tried this for one full RV season. The mixing became a pain. The water needed to be added down into the tank took away a significant volume of what the tank was supposed to hold - the waste and we were dumping the black tank much more frequently. It did not work any better than the Camco TST. It did not fix the black tank sensors to work accurately. It involved carrying more than the just one bottle of tank treatment that cost less than the borax and detergent. We went back to the TST.
The one thing your RT black tank likes more than anything else is water. You should never allow the black tank to dry out. It must be kept moist as not all of the waste is going to get dumped out of the tank. If the tank is dry after dumping that waste builds up - dries out and will clog the opening into the pipe to the macerator and stay inside the tank. The fix is simple - put in one gallon of water into the black tank after dumping the tank and leave it there. I have a collapsible silicone gallon pail that is easy to fill up and dump into the toilet and down into the black tank. It is flat when not in use and fits easily into one of the RT storage cabinets. The other place to keep moist is the flap in the toilet bowl. That needs to be kept moist so that the rubber flap which seals the toilet bowl to hold water does not dry out - as if it does the toilet will not hold water and you are using the bowl dry which means some cleaning that you do not want to do. To put water into the bowl after flushing just hold the foot pedal down only part way and the flap will stay closed and water will go into the toilet bowl. Once the flap is under water stop. With both of these - when winterizing and there is no water - use RV antifreeze into the black tank to keep it moist and do the same over the flap.
What can go wrong with the toilet? One thing that we experienced when our RT was winterized the first two years that we had it was that at that time the winterizing process started with using compressed air to clear out the plumbing before using the RV antifreeze. NOTE DO NOT DO THIS! The compressed air pushed mineral deposits in the pipes into the toilet flush valve - the valve behind the left side of the back of the toilet - looking from the front of the toilet - and the mineral deposits jammed and broke the flush valve. This happened after dewinterizing on a trip and the water flooded the floor of the Roadtrek and the only way to stop it was to shut off the water pump - turning it back on caused the flooding to start again. Our RT was under warranty at the time and the dealer service replaced the flush valve. We were not aware that the compressed air did this and winterized the same way with the air the next year- and the same thing happened when we de-winterized. This time the service shop took the valve apart and rebuilt it. What else can go wrong? Even with the flush flap moist with water in the bowl after 12 years the toilet bowl stopped holding water. I tried different recommended ways to fix this - none worked. Recommended was get a silicone plumbers gel lubricant and open the flap and smear the lubricant all around the bottom edge of the flap - it still leaked all water out and down the toilet drain in a day. There is a liquid lubricant for this - hard to find. Got one local RV repair shop to order a bottle for me - did not work! We took the Roadtrek to that dealer who replaced the rubber flap and the rubber seal between the toilet drain and the black tank pipe. (The two seals are sold as set.) To do this the toilet had to be removed from the floor, plumbing disconnected, and the bottom seal is put onto the toilet from the bottom of the toilet - and the flush flap seal is also put in the same way. Some try to do this with the toilet in place - but the drain seal can only be put in with the toilet off the floor. If flush seal is bad so is the drain seal.
Alternatives to a regular RV toilet --
Some look to replace the toilet with a composting toilet. Some years back when the original Roadtrek was still in business, Roadtrek was asked on a forum why they did not put a composting toilet into the Roadtrek. Their answer was - the inside of the van is so small that a composting toilet's odor will overwhelm the inside of the Roadtrek. That is not something you want to sleep with inside. Also - RVs that have composting toilets are not only larger but there is an access panel from outside to inside where the toilet is to empty the compost out. Without this you are scooping and carrying compost through the Roadtrek and out - and finding a place to put it. More stench!
Then there are cassette toilets. A cassette toilet collects the waste into a box which has to be removed and carried to a restroom and poured out into a toilet - hopefully not including it pouring on your legs and feet. Again RVs - and some Class Bs have an access panel through the RV wall form outside to get the box out and not have to carry it through the RV to get it out. I saw a very funny episode of a show from England where composing toilets are popular in RVs (there called Caravans). The man in the show pulled the cassette out through the access panel and it started to spill on him and the ground and then he started off looking for a place to pour it out and getting there it emptied itself all over him. It was funny - and done for humor but oh so possible to happen.
Is there something to use if your toilet is not working. Yes - this article shows that and explains it. Go to the end of the article and read about DOUBLE DOODIE Toilet Waste Bags!
Well that is everything you either wanted to know or rather that you did not know about the Roadtrek toilet.
If you have questions - email us with the link in the right column that says Email Us.
