What Cleaning Products Should I Use To Clean My RV’s Sinks and Showers?
Chris Simpson
Here at Unique Camping and Marine, we often get questions about all sorts of different areas in and around the RV. One which we frequently hear is, “What should I be cleaning my RV sinks and showers with?” Today we will shed some light on that topic.
It is important to be mindful of what goes down your sinks and showers, since they typically feed into the gray water holding tank on the RV. When you are camping at a full hook-up campground, you have the option to leave the gray water holding tank valve in either the open or closed position.
Many people prefer to keep their valve in the open position so they don’t run out of capacity or run the risk of overflowing the gray tank and making a big mess. We often remind RVers that it’s totally fine to leave the gray tank valve open when you’re camping on hookups to allow the liquids to flow directly out of the tank into the sewer port.
This is true as long as you keep a p-trap in the sewer discharge hose with some water in it. This will create a vapor barrier between the campground sewer port and the RV so sewer gas cannot back up into the RV, which can be stinky and potentially dangerous. If you are camping at a full hookups campground and are leaving the gray water holding tank valve open, it would seem as though cleaning your sinks and shower(s) with anything you want should be no problem. After all, everything runs right out of the RV without causing any issues in the gray tank, right? But responsibility doesn’t stop at the walls of your RV. Your product choices also have an impact on the campground’s septic or sewer system.
Many campgrounds are on septic systems because they are too rural to be near a municipal wastewater system. However, some campgrounds that are close to a city or township with a municipal wastewater system may still use septic systems because the local wastewater plant doesn’t want to deal with the large volumes of water, waste, and all of the wild things that come out of RVs. The same can be said for most RV dump stations. Because of this, we encourage people to use specific types of cleaners that are safe for your RV’s gray tank AND the septic or sewer system you’re dumping your tanks into
Even though not much cleaning product actually ends up going down the drain, especially since most cleaning products are heavily diluted, we still recommend always using the right types of cleaning products to eliminate the slim chance of damage to your campground’s septic or sewer system. This best practice will also help 1) prevent damage to your gray tank seals and 2) avoid disrupting the bacteria and enzymes that aid in your wastewater treatment. We have compiled a list of several products that we believe will have the least amount of negative impact on your RV gray water system and the wastewater system beyond.
We selected the products below by cross-referencing the ingredients provided by the manufacturers with the EU (European Union) list of biocides, as well as checking each of the product’s SDS (Safety Data Sheet) for hazardous materials.
The major things we were looking for were harmful chemicals including, but not limited to: bleaches, phosphates, and biocides (specifically antibacterial biocides), as these affect the RV’s gray water system and the septic system beyond. Please note: certain biocides that are listed on the EU master list are not particularly damaging to the RV or wastewater systems, such as citric acid, and therefore are still included in our list of recommendations.
This is by no means a complete list of products that are safe to use in an RV but is, rather, a list of products that we are comfortable recommending after what we learned from our research. Many other common cleaning products that are not listed here may be perfectly fine to use in your RV, but because their manufacturers do not provide SDS sheets, we cannot confirm their ingredient claims and as such, we cannot include them in our list of recommended products. NOTE: We did not receive any incentive or payment from any of the products listed below. They are listed in alphabetical order.
- AspenClean Natural All Purpose Cleaner
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