About two weeks into our recent tour we noticed that the sink tap was no longer spraying as normal and seemed to be struggling to discharge water. My first thought was that the submersible pump in the water container might be playing up but when I checked, it was whirring around freely and apparently in good health.
I prodded the holes in the tap with a pin but without much success. Then I noticed that the washbasin tap was also playing up (ours is the blue plastic shower handset on an extending hose). If the tap was set to spray, the flow was poor with most of the jets seeming to be blocked but when I turned it to the tap setting, the flow seemed to be normal - but I then noticed small black deposits in the washbasin.
As I didn't have a spanner large enough to remove the washroom tap spray head and I could see no way of dismantling the sink tap, there was little I could do. My best guess was that a rubber washer had disintegrated and was causing the blockages.
Then, quite suddenly, the sink tap went back to normal delivery but the washbasin flow seemed to get worse.
Yesterday I removed the washbasin tap shower insert and found it almost completely blocked with shiny jet black, film-like deposits that clearly were not rubber. I poked all this stuff out, cleaned all the grooves in the insert with a pin and left the insert to soak in Viakal for a while. On reassembly, everything works perfectly.
But where had I seen deposits like these before?
Some of you may recall a discussion about black deposits in the toilet flush tank that appear in the toilet bowl from time to time. These appear to be some sort of mould that can be difficult to remove. When I stripped my (manual) flushing pump some time ago, I thought that the pump bulb was made of black plastic when in fact it is made of clear plastic. I'm pretty sure that the black stuff in my water system was the same as the mould in the toilet. Mould in toilet
But why should this have appeared?
When I laid the caravan up for the winter last October, I drained the water system, switched off the 12v supply to the taps and left them open. Before I used the van again I made up a solution of Milton sterilant and left it in the system overnight after running some through the taps. I then thoroughly flushed the system out with clean water before using the system on holiday.
Could there be low point in the pipework somewhere where water had lain allowing the mould to grow?
Has anyone else experienced this and if so, what steps have you taken to prevent a recurrence?
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to empty out any trapped water
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