Tag: water

Bailey Senator – Water supply – no pressure!

At the start of my recent holiday – on the day we arrived in France (after all the checking I had done before we left!) we lost our water supply.

The water flowed fine for a second or so – and then just went to a trickle on both Hot and Cold supplies. After much checking of pumps, pump filter, pipes, connectors etc… I finally found the problem:

There is a Tee-Valve change-over on the inlet of the pump to select between “External water tank” and “Internal Water tank”- on the “pump” side of the Tee-connector there is a “Filter Mesh” INSIDE of the fitting – this was blocked! – To clear this, you just have to remove the Tee-Connector (push fittings) and run the fitting under a “campsite” tap to reverse flush the dirt from the filter. However, you would be advised to drain ALL of your water system down first, including the hot tank and on-board tank as otherwise you will have water “finding it’s own level”.

Once I flushed the valve and refitted it – No more problems!

Automatic On-board Water Tank fill System (& Tracker) Part 1

This article is written around my 2009 Bailey Senator Arizona – but this could probably be done on many other caravans that already have an on-board tank (or you are fitting a tank).

On holiday in France recently, we had problems (yet again), with the O rings of the Whale water inlet (connection to the external barrel), such that I couldn’t even fill the onboard tank properly (which is a pain in itself – messing with manual change-over valves!).

It occurred to me then that if I *could* fill the onboard tank (even by pouring water in the top), I wouldn’t have to bleed the air every time the offboard tank ran out of water! (I have already fitted an Audible alarm to the low level warning light for the onboard tank -which you can’t see on the Bailey, unless you make a point of looking!).

I couldn’t find my spare O rings at the time, but I fixed the external filler using “gas grade” PTFE tape (thicker than the cheap water stuff), that I always keep in the van as part of my “first aid kit” (good to refit worn screws for example). I wrapped it around the damaged / missing O rings.

Anyway – I decided I wanted an “auto-fill” to my on-board tank – similar to a modification I made to my Lunar around 20 years ago.

I looked on the market – there is NOTHING, nothing on Ebay, Nothing on “The Web”, nothing on YouTube, nothing in the Forums on how to do this… No gadgets, no advice, no discussion – maybe I’m the only one that wants this ????

So here is how I did it on my Bailey Senator:

Oh – and BTW if you came here looking for “Tracker” – I will also tell you how to replace the battery in your On-board (hidden) Tracker device. (Bailey Senator Arizona only – Other Bailey’s may be similar!)

Continued in Part 2…