Flood in TrailManor!
Our TM is our first RV, and we bought a hail-damaged unit at a great price, so that we could afford to screw it up during our learning process. Well, screw it up we did, although so far it seems not badly.
I'd gone right to sleep when we came home from dinner. The air conditioning was running, so we couldn't hear much else. At some point Valerie noticed that we'd left the water turned off. She turned it on and went to sleep. Without checking that all of the faucets were closed.
4 hours later, around 2:30 AM, I got up to find the bathroom faucet fully open and running, and water pooling in the bathroom, on the rear carpet, and in the kitchen area by the sink. Apparently we hadn't leveled the trailer perfectly (our refrigerator doesn't care about level) and the water didn't go forward of the sink.
The water would have been much deeper, but it was running out of the bottom of the trailer in one or two places despite my efforts to seal places that critters could enter. Perhaps from under the toilet.
I turned off the water and we dried all areas as much as possible with towels and dirty clothes.There was no water in cabinets or under drawers except for the bathroom wall cabinet and the back cabinet under the bed, and we dried them. I didn't look behind the converter at this point, leaving working with wet electrical equipment for the morning. This left the carpet still damp. We started a wash of the wet clothes and towels, opened windows and turned on the fan, and after I took a big melatonin, slept until morning.
In the morning the carpet was still wet and it was clear that the Masonite cabinetry in some areas or its paper surface had become wet or wicked water to a point up to an inch from the floor and was slightly water-stained. I decided to rip out the carpet. On picking up the carpet, it was clear that the padding was an open-core foam and was saturated like a sponge. It would never have dried properly without removal. Ripping up the carpet unraveled fiber near the staples, so we threw out the carpet and padding. With the carpet gone, everything else dried quickly. I pulled out the converter, and the area behind it was dry, so I put it back.
We drove back home with the bathroom exhaust fan running and left it that way in the trailer storage, on the battery and solar panel. Today I'll look for any remaining damage. I will replace the padding with closed-pore pad for outdoor carpet, and the carpet with an outdoor one. I am not replacing the front carpet yet, it remained dry and looks more difficult to replace because there's a lot of moulding to pull up and it seems to go under the front edge of the couch.
Obviously Valerie was horribly sorry about this. I retained my calm. Valerie is sure she won't forget this, and will be careful to check all valves after turning on water or gas supplies.
|
I ran in to discover the problem but sadly it had flooded the bathroom and the carpet out side. So I dried everything up the best that I could but didn't rip out the carpet. I just left my trailer open at my house in 100°+ Texas weather for about a week and all was fine, crisp, and dry as a bone...I guess there's something good to the scorchers of Texas in the summer.
Linear Mode
