The hoses were God-awful. I didn't stuff my nose against them, but even looking at them, there must've been some permeation there. Not to mention that the toilet didn't even actually work. Now maybe it could've been rebuilt.. but why? And on top of that, the plumbing was all wrong anyway. In my particular boat, the holding tank was an old 6 gallon cell, mounted (and loosely at that) under the port side of the rear of the V-berth. I say loosely, as I realized during this project that there should've been a shelf to mount it on, which had since been destroyed and long gone. The intake hose for the toilet wasn't even plumbed to anything, so the only way to have tried to flush would be to dump water in the bowl, either from the sink or cups or something. Not convenient. The tank itself may have been salvageable if not for the giant gaping hole on top that someone shoved some plastic dryer vent hose in an attempt to vent the fumes out. Yeah, duct taping that into a roughly cut gaping hole is SURE to do wonders.
If you're at all interested, here's a link to that youtube fiasco.
So I went up on Saturday, got there in the afternoon. I intended to start working on it then, but then got thinking that for the sake of self-preservation, I would just relax on board until Sunday, and then tackle it. That way I wasn't elbow deep in yucky stuff, and having to leave anything open while I tried to sleep.
So instead, I arranged my new foam that arrived that morning, in the cabin. Nothing covered yet, and I mis-remembered my V-berth size so it's a little on the small side, but it should be a nice change to have actual cushions when I'm done. Saturday night was just spent with some internet surfing, and watching Netflix. Side note: One day of binge-watching Netflix on whatever my auto-bandwidth settings are on, blows through a 15 gig hotspot allowance.
Sunday arrived, and despite my not wanting to get dirty, it was time. I donned my fancy Harbor Freight respirator, and some heavy yellow gloves, and got to work. First step was the head itself. On the Newport 28, there's really no access to the bottom of the shelf that the head sits on. This means that if the bolt starts spinning, you rapidly run out of options. There are three bolts, two on the "bowl" side, and one just under the front of the handle. One nut came off nice and easy. One was more stubborn, and the last, even more stubborn still. But with a combination of jamming a flathead screwdriver under the washer with upward pressure - this pulls the head of the bolt underneath tighter to the underside of the shelf, which adds more friction and ideally would be enough to stop the bolt from spinning while undoing the nut - so I succeeded after a while. I also learned it's surprisingly warm wearing a respirator, even when the temperature is under 70 degrees.
Before I could pull the head out though, I needed to unhook the discharge hose from the holding tank. Now this is where it starts getting disgusting. You can skip to the end if you're squeamish. The hose came off the fitting on the holding tank relatively easy. It also was not empty. This meant I needed to keep the end up high enough to not dump anything in the boat, but not so high that it overflowed the bowl going backwards. In a perfect world, I'd have a cap of some sort to put on the end. It is not a perfect world. I used a copious amount of duct tape to make a "hopefully this is good enough" seal on the end, and laid out a double-layer of trash bags in the head compartment. Pulling the head up, I put it in the bags, and then pulled the hose through the bulkhead quickly enough to get it looped into the bag and all tied off with very minimal um...spillage. The intake hose was no issue, since it wasn't freaking hooked to anything!
The next steps were to try to free the hoses from their places. The hose that went from the holding tank to the manual pump and outward to the discharge thruhull was remarkably stubborn. So much so that I decided to remove the entire assembly - minus the hose that had gone between the pump and thruhull. I had decided to flush that hose with water and so opened the thruhull which started a steady pinhole leak out of the side, on the upper side of the valve. Closing it, no water. Opening, water. So, rather than risk extra strain by yanking on an old hose, that one got a pass to stay. I had to actually remove the cover to the holding tank with the hoses attached. It was a lot of not looking, and a lot of holding my breath out of reflex. After an hour or so, I finally managed to get everything else out, minus that one hose. They were all stuffed into layers upon layers of sealed trash bags, and carefully positioned upright to avoid spillage.
After sponge-cleaning out the rest of the v-berth compartments, the installation of the Dometic was pretty straight forward. I popped the box open, and found myself a nice little surprise. When I had decided this was the model I was going to purchase, I needed to determine which version. They have two colors, and they also have a standard equipment, and an MSD kit version. The latter includes a fitting that replaces the pour-out spout on the holding tank with a cap with fittings for a pumpout hose and vent. My understanding was that the cap replaced the spout in the package, and most forum posts I could find didn't really lead me to think otherwise. And since the price of the version I bought with the MSD kit was so much cheaper than the other, I assumed it couldn't possibly.
I popped the box, pulled it apart and voila! Best of all worlds. The holding tank had the spout cap pre-installed and the pump-out cap sitting quietly in a bag, waiting to be used. I haven't ordered new hose yet as I wasn't sure how long a run I would need, so I left the spout in place to use it as an actual porta unit instead of permanent. The holding clamps are a vast improvement over the plastic ones on my Thetford on the last boat. It didn't take more than ten minutes to lay out the brackets, pre-drill the holes, and screw them down. I did go up another 1/16" on the drill bit size to make it a little easier, which didn't make it any less sturdy.
So now, let's hope we don't need it.
