RV Toilet Chemical and Formaldehyde

As the toilet has finally come into service, the next logical step was to purchase the chemicals for the holding tank..

Another unbelievable task made of confusing myth, formats and colours variations.. Why do business always try to confuse us instead of helping each other into an easier way of living..

In just a few minutes I manage to find at least 4 blogs with name such as “the best toilet chemical” or “Warning! Formaldehyde will kill you!”.  In those case it always pay to go to the bottom of the page where the disclaimer mentioned the fact that those “blog” are paid percentage sales and, you can bet your life on it, contain no much truth or some extremely distorted one.. 😑

My first priority was to establish what the hell was Formaldehyde and why is so dangerous.

Wikipedia has an article on it here and if you take your time to read it entirely, you can see that, while it present danger to humans (what doesn’t??), its already used in combination with other chemical and it has a widespread use to the rate of $145 billions in 2003 just in the US and Canada. Bottom line is is a chemical indispensable ATM to our society and it seem it is here to stay.

The South Australia Health website also has an article on the subject that confirm Wikipedia article.. Will Formaldehyde kill you? No, no really! I mean, if you are a smoker, you are already getting your daily dosage of Formaldehyde, so in such case yes, it will kill you, but used in the black and grey water tanks, is not really the same thing.. I’m not here promoting the use of such chemical, far from it, but I like to keep the story to a realistic level.. 😉

With the chemical sorted, it was not the time to pick a colour. It seem that toilet chemicals do come in clear, blue, green, orange and purple.. CaravanPlus have an article and some mentioning of the colour, but there is no mentioning of either the purple or the orange and just a rule of thumb where it state that green is better than blue if you use septic system and blue if you use dumping point..

So now I need to decide what my black tank really is.. A septic tank is:

a tank, typically underground, in which sewage is collected and allowed to decompose through bacterial activity before draining by means of a soak away

While a black water tank is:

a black water tank does contain faeces, urine, water and toilet paper from flush toilets

It seem to me that all RVs are then based on the black water system/tank and not on the septic, as we need to discharge the lot and not just the fluids. Perhaps CaravanPlus is referring to those people that dump their black water tank content in their own or other people rural septic system.

So if using a product that its septic friendly, it does allow a larger choice of dumping points. That’s got to be good. Now is just a matter to pick the product that it is septic friendly and also does keep my black tank working properly..

Before I dig deeper into the choice of product I’ll use I would like just to mention that last year I also did test all the toilet papers for biodegradability sold at Woolworth and the result was that they are virtually all the same. Within a day they were all almost gone with the exception of Quilton that did lasted an extra 6 hours before disappearing like the rest. This test was done just in plain water and nothing else as per pictures..

Just keep that in mind next time you are about to purchase that “special” ‘biodegradable’ RV toilet paper..

I mean $16.99 dollars for 4 rolls.. A bargain.. 😀

I don’t have much experience with either the green, purple or orange product but I always used in the past the Walex Pod system. It is easy to use and I never had a problem with empty the tanks even in those vehicle without the macerator.. But it is expensive, so I would like to try the Camco 41195 TST MAX Strength Orange Scent and see if it really works as advertised..