Keep your van water supply flowing with a functioning filter, says Tony Brown
WEEKEND WORKSHOP
WE TEND TO take the caravan cold-water system for granted. It is simple and straightforward, and in theory, it will never go wrong. Or perhaps it can?
Our van had its annual service late in the year, but prior commitments meant that it was not watered ready for use until quite recently, in preparation for early-season trips (making up for lost time!).
We fitted the new immersible pump and switched on, to find the flow at the cold tap was very slow. When the tap was turned off, there was also insufficient pressure to turn off the pump, which continued to run.
In addition, the water-heater took an age to fill. We came to the conclusion that something was definitely wrong.
Check the flow
There was much scratching of heads until we came up with the bright idea of connecting the pump wires off the caravan socket by two short lengths of wire, each with insulated crocodile clips on the ends.
This enabled us to see that the pump flow was excellent, so the problem was clearly in the caravan system itself.
We checked the pressure switch, but this is connected at a T-piece and water doesn’t flow through it, so that clearly wasn’t the difficulty.
Finally, we removed the blue filter cover, just above where the pump connector is plugged in. The old filter looked well past its best and actually fell apart on removal. The thought occurred to us that perhaps after three years, it was clogged and not functioning properly.
The blue cover was replaced with no filter in position and the system tested again. Eureka! We now get an even better flow than with a new filter in place, which is how we plan to go on.
With hindsight, telling the service engineer every year that we did not need a new filter at f
