About a week ago, I noticed some small changes in the laminate on the wood frame that houses the water heater under the bathroom counter. The changes showed a small area where there was separation or bubbling but I could only see it from a certain angle. This spot was otherwise unremarkable, small, dry and the storage space adjacent to it did not show any issues. Because of this, I did not think twice about it wondering if it was like that before but I just hadn’t noticed it. This past Sunday taught me a VERY valuable lesson. This area in the frame was worse! Still very small but I definitely noticed that the bubbling was more than the previous week! This led to a horrible discovery!
We have a LEAK!! When we removed the drawer from the bathroom on our Grand Design 2600RB, there was an active Moderate to Severe leak at the connection between the main waterline entering into the bathroom and the outdoor shower port! The floor of this area inside the water heater box was puddled and the particle board separating this space from the storage area has a water damage line of about 3 inches. Needless to say, we went into damage control mode right away! Shutting off water to the entire rig, drying the space with towels and then placed a fan in the boxed area overnight to help dry out the floor and walls. We are very fortunate to be in a dry climate with very little humidity because by morning everything was dry to the touch!
We then had to figure out how to repair the leak and came up with 2 options! Repair or Bypass! When I first saw the leak, it was between the white pipe and the black screw on connection piece.
We decided to test Teflon Tape first. (We keep Teflon Tape in our RV emergency repair kit) There was no Teflon Tape used during original installment from the factory! The tape worked and the connection no longer leaks but we found bigger issues that we will probably address in the near future to make sure this never happens again. The black screw on connection piece would not tighten down without the Teflon Tape. This piece is probably stripped and needs to be replaced if we decide to not bypass this connection all together.
After finding this leak we started to realize there were other signs of a water leak that we unknowingly notice many weeks back! Under the rig, in the area under the bathroom, we saw a pool of water forming. Originally thinking it was just condensation dripping, we blew it off. Since then, we realized that this drip was the first sign we saw of the leak. Investigating unusual findings in your Rig right away is a lesson learned the hard way this week! If we would have looked into the laminate changes or the outside drip right away, we could have halted any additional damage many weeks ago.
After this incident, we decided to pull every drawer out and look behind every cabinet to make sure we did not have any other leaks at any other connection sites! Safety First!
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