Jayco 28BHS filling hot water tank & lines took 24 gallons?

[blakei]

Hi all, prepping for our first trip of the year. I like to sanitize my tank / lines after fully draining water for the winter (hot water and low points are fully drained).

Because I am at home and don't have a place to dump a full fresh tank (~75 gallons) I wanted to add just enough chlorinated water to fill the hot water heater and flush the lines a bit. Plan is to let that sit, then flush out with some additional non-chlorinated water, and dump it all at our first campground.

So... I didn't want to pull around a bunch of water. I figured 6 gallons for the hot water heater, maybe 2-3 gallons for the lines to fill up, etc. I started with 8 gallons of chlorinated water... hot water tank still gurgled, air in lines. I added another 4 gallons chlorinated, same thing. I kept adding 4 gallons at a time and ended up putting in 24 gallons before kitchen sink, bathroom sink, and shower stopped spitting air and the pump stopped running.

I'm floored by how much water it took to "refill" the system to minimum -- I don't have any water to "use" without adding more. It seems unreasonable to me. I am parked level (within 1-2 degrees).

I figured if I have 40 feet of PEX (guessing for all the lines) at 0.5" diameter, that's 240 cubic inches of water, or only about a gallon. That plus 6 gallon hot water and I should need less than ten gallons, right?

What am I missing here? Anyone else have experience with this?

[blakei]

Just some more info on this in case helpful.


My "level" home setup is not as level as I thought, apparently. I could add another 2" under my curb side to get more level...


I ended up draining out 15 gallons through the low point drains before we hit the road. That means I ended up with about 11 gallons to fill the hot water tank and pipes etc, which seems much more reasonable.


However, it does remain a frustration that I have to have +15 gallons in the tank before the pump works. This continued to be a challenge throughout our trip -- I had to have 15-20 gallons before we'd get consistent water unless leveled in our site. That's a lot more weight than I'd like to tow around just to be able to wash & flush while driving to the next site.


(I also seem to be unable to fill more than 45 gallons into my "75" gallon tank before water comes out of the overflow lines... maybe I'll have to do a bigger investigation at some point).

[Jims_fmr]

Had a similar problem with my 2016 Jay Flight 23RB. Couldn’t put more than 10-15 gallons (estimated) before water was running out of the overflow. Had an RV tech check the problem and he found that the fill line was routed above the water heater and kinked. His impression was that it had been like this since the original build. The former owner never used the water tank just city water connection.