With the recent news that the wheel wells would be 12″ instead of 10″, I’ve reconsidered the height of my raised floor. 12″ was just a little more than I wanted, and something a bit less than 10″ would work pretty well too.
At the moment, I’ve settled on a 7″ raised floor. The image above (larger version) has been updated and I’ve moved things around since the last time I laid it all out. I’ve done a whole bunch of shopping around online and I’ve found what I think is the most competitive price for holding tanks. I’m staying at about my 100-gallons-per-tank goal, and I’ve managed to reduce the cost by around $700. That cost of course depends on shipping, which is pretty awful for these things, so I’ll wait to hear what that ends up being.
With this new design the trap door that was in front of the shower is moved to within the kitchen cabinet, so that’s a bonus. Of course, the water heater is going to be in that cabinet too, so it’s going to get very crowded. I’ve also moved the main dump area a bit towards the front of the trailer to make accessing the various ports on the grey and black tanks a bit easier with the new trap door.
The trap door under the kitchen table pretty much remains in place. It’ll let me get at the vent openings for the grey and black tanks. I may or may not put a trap door under the sink area. I might just plumb those pipes in and not worry about it. Or perhaps route them around to the same input where the shower will be draining into the grey tank.
I’m still planning on having the dual water pump setup. The fresh water pump and it’s distribution lines are now really easy to get at with the trap door under the cabinets. Routing the grey line to the toilet will be a little trickier, but I’ll either work my way through that or re-engineer it on the fly.
Overall I’m pretty happy with this design. I saved some money, gave myself some extra headroom, kept my tank capacities, and made the step up from outside much closer to the height of a standard stair step.