A RV water heater with no hot water is like having peanut butter with no jelly. Did you recently buy your rv and get the quick walk through PDI? Are you having problems making your water heater heat water?? Well hopefully I’ll be able to help you sort through the issue with this post. I’m not going to cover every single problem that you may have here but I’m going to go through a few thing that it could be. If you’d rather watch our video you can click on it here. If you have any questions whether you watch the video or not leave a comment on the video in YouTube and we will answer it there. No account on YouTube? No problem, just hit our FaceBook or Twitter pages and message us there.
So, first things first. You want to make 100% sure you have water in the heater BEFORE turning on your electric element!!!!! It only takes a fraction of a second to blow the element like a fuse if there isn’t any water in the tank. Go to your control panel and make sure that the winterizing bypass valve is not in the bypass mode.
RV Water Heater Bypass Switch
Then to make sure you have water in the tank you can do one of a couple things. You can open the poppet on the pressure relief valve on the outside of the camper. You can also open the hot faucet on any of your faucets. If you open the cold it will not fill the water heater so make sure you know which one you are opening.
RV Water Heater Pressure Relief Valve
Now that we are sure we have water in the tank, let’s turn on our electric element. There may be one switch or there may be two. If you have only one it could either be inside the camper or outside where you found the poppet pressure relief valve. When there are two make sure both are on. I personally installed a second one inside so I would not have to go outside to turn it on if I forgot and was “shower ready”. On my set up I leave the one outside in the on position and just control it with the one inside. On our camper we can usually tell relatively fast whether or not we are getting hot water.
If you are dry camping or boondocking and are using solely propane to heat your water you can turn that on. If you need hot water and need it yesterday or have more than one person taking a shower, turn both the electric and the propane on together. Doing this helps the water heater recover faster and anyone after the first person taking a shower won’t complain about having to finish up in cold water.
That’s about all there is to check when you are hoping for a simple solution. A more in depth check will come in a later post.
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