Black tank smell coming through air

[Uke player]

It sounds so bad that you may want to consider replacing the entire black tank. Check the gray water tank too. it can really smell bad as well. The people you bought it from must have really let it go with no treatment. Another thing is (and I know some people feel differently) We never would just have an open sewer line hooked up from the trailer to the dump port. It's best to treat the tanks using a gallon of water sloshing around while you drive to your destination. Use the tanks and when they are full, dump the whole tanks. Momentum of the full tanks will flush out the tanks. The open sewer hook up idea, it just drips sewage and can back up smell into toilet area.

[richard5933]

Even if there is something in the black tank which smells, that smell shouldn't permeate the trailer unless something is wrong. The only time we get a smell is when the toilet flush valve is open which creates a direct path for the odor to enter the trailer.

Also, there are two main source of smell inside the trailer: the black/gray tanks and leaking propane. If you have batteries mounted in the nose of the trailer they can also create smell if they are boiling, but I believe your batteries are on the tongue and not inside the nose of the trailer.

Mice can create a very strong and distinct odor, but in my experience it's not the mouse poop which creates the worse smell - it's the urine. The smell from the urine won't go away until the urine goes away. When we bought our trailer there was mouse urine in a few places which stunk up the entire trailer. Luckily they weren't in there long enough to do any damage chewing through things, but all along the path they were traveling there was a sticky coating of mouse pee. It took hours of cleaning with a good disinfectant to remove the smell, and this involved manually wiping down every wire, hose, etc. in the area between the water pump - kitchen - back bedroom under bed storage area.

Dead mice typically only give off a smell for a week or so - after that they start to dry up and there is no smell. I've found dead mice remains in my house attic/basement long after they've dried up and the only way I knew they were there was seeing them. But when they first die the smell can be overwhelming. If you are still having a smell from dead mice then they're still in there dying.

If the smell is truly from the black/gray tanks there are only a few possibilities in my experience. You can have a failed air-admittance valve as has been mentioned earlier, you can have a failed toilet flush valve seal, or you can have a broken pluming pipe somewhere exposing the trailer to the odor from the tanks. Of you have a borescope you can try to run it through the toilet and take a look inside the tank for signs of damage. Checking the gray tank will be more difficult but hopefully you can find an access point. The other thing to check is inside the cavities where the drain plumbing runs to see if your plastic pipes have broken or separated.

If you have a failed toilet seal under the toilet and run the exhaust fans inside the trailer, you'll also get odor from the tank. The fans are strong enough to create negative pressure inside the trailer to pull the odor up. We learned early on not to flush the toilet if the trailer is closed and the exhaust fan is running in the bathroom - there is nowhere to pull air from so as soon as the flush valve is open it sucks the odor right up and into your face.