Lostranger wrote:Sharkey's Crown does appear to have most of its supply and drainage lines in an area above the original bus floor and below the new living space floor. This should result in similar freeze protection. However, I don't see any holding tanks installed on the Crown. I have the impression that he intends to move this bus seldom and always be connected to shore utilities when he uses it. Putting fresh, grey and black water holding tanks in his inter-floor area would be problematic. It's a different setup for a different purpose.
Quite right, the Crown is really being built as a portable house, not an RV. I do have plans to put small grey and black water holding tanks above the front axle, between the frame rails for those few times I will need to be self-contained.
In the Housetruck, I usually just leave the kitchen faucet running a bit in cold weather. This usually works, but not always. In very severe cold weather, or when the water supply is unavailable (usually due to freezing or other failures), I simply drain the pipes and haul the water in the old fashioned way. When I lived back in the woods and depended on a fresh water tank mounted on the frame to supply the water, I usually just drained the system in October and recommissioned it sometime in late March or early April. No worries about frozen pipes. Of course, the drain plumbing would eventually get frozen, which meant that I had to haul the water in and haul it back out, using a 5 gallon bucket under the sink to catch the water coming out of the disconnected P-trap.
Pretty hard core, eh?
Here's a pic of the Crown plumbing, I'm hoping that it's insulated enough that I can forego the hauling-out part:
It was necessary to put the plumbing inside the floor boost because the original bus floor is constructed directly on the chassis frame rails, there are no spaces through which pipes can cross from one side to the other. Putting the fixture pipes through both floors and attempting to make connections under the bus and into tanks would have resulted in plumbing that was scraping the road! It was quite a job to get everything sloped properly and connected where it needed to go in the 6+ inches of the floor boost!!
Old Housetrucker Zen saying:
"Haul wood, chop water"