The toilet in the old SportCam was novel. And green! It could actually reuse waste water. Seriously?
No joke. It's recycling toilet could be flushed with wash water. At least that's how SCI implemented it. I admit that part of my brain sees some merit to the idea. Most RVs squander their limited on-board supply of good potable water down the black tank just to rinse the toilet bowl. This toilet used gray water instead. Reduce, reuse, recycle, right? Hm.
Unsurprisingly, the devil's always in the details. How exactly did it work? Not simply. For starters, the holding tank's gate valves were different. Like most RVs the old SportCam had two tanks for gray and black water with separate gate valves for each. Instead of both outlets merging into a common outlet, they were separate. The 3" sewer hose connects to a bayonet flange for the black tank. So far, so good.
The gray water system was less conventional. A 1-1/2" schedule 40 coupling exits the shell incognito. A plug adapter converted to 3/4" spigot thread for connecting a hose. That or just park a bucket directly under the outlet. Then pull the small gate valve to collect shower water.
Collecting dish water was different. In part because that sink drained into the black not gray tank. Probably because of space constraints with the shell design. The gray tank only holds 8 gallons, whereas the black tank holds 18. Maybe instead of "black" the larger holding tank should be considered brown or dark gray. After all toilet sewage gets diluted with wash water from both sinks. Shrug.
It gets wonkier. There was a drain bypass for the kitchen sink. More small gate valves could divert that sink to drain directly outside instead of its holding tank. Where the shell overhangs a typical pickup bed on the passenger side another spigot thread was provided for collecting dish water.
As for the toilet itself I'm not entirely sure how exactly its recycling magic worked. I supposed its coarse wire mesh screen separated liquids from solids.
There was some kind of membrane filter. Possibly reverse osmosis? I suppose that refined the liquids into two parts. Presumably the waste side was the really yuckies. Hopefully the recycled side was less offensive. Given what it looked like inside the dismantled toilet, however, I'm not so sure.
Maybe gray water collected in a bucket was poured down the toilet bowl. When it's empty of course. Then, maybe pressure from gravity forced water through that membrane that lined the toilet bowl. Seepage is apparently how the toilet's internal reservoir was filled, because there was no inlet hose or port. So that's my best guess how its reservoir was filled. Funky stuff.
A float-driven dial gauge behind the seat indicated the level of flush water in its reservoir. This required some prior planning, obviously. Membrane seepage filtration probably took some time to fill the reservoir. One needed to make sure flush water was cached before needing to do business. Otherwise, waiting could amount practicing one's potty dance!
It's clear enough that actually flushing the toilet involved two more steps. First, pulling a gate valve at the bottom of the toilet bowl discharged its contents into the black tank. Kersplash.
Then, a sump pump inside the reservoir pumped flush water up and out to rinse down the toilet bowl. A flush switch was behind the toilet seat to operate the flush pump.
If all that sounds like a lot of poo poo voodoo to you too, then we agree. Moreover, judging from the grungy pix it didn't work so great either. I mean, talk about a hygiene nightmare.
Gross! The good news is fiberglass can be forgiving of such neglect. The shower stall cleaned up well enough.
In my humble opinion that whole toilet solution was, with the benefit of objective hindsight to be sure, just naive and misguided. Bad idea in other words. So that toilet was obviously scrapped. Good riddance! There are better solutions these days, which I'll get into later.
