S/V Moitessier...: Heads Finally Up

Apologies again for they huge delay in updating, no excuse this time, I'm simply a slacker. A lot has gone on since I've last posted. Our head is finally back in with all new Trident 101 hoses. This has been the bane of our existence for quite some time. After the whole holding tank debacle, we moved forward with the project using Dometic Sealand Odor Safe Plus hoses. We had originally done a tremendous amount of research on which hoses to go with, and after reading that these were best of the best in terms of low potential odor permeation, we decided to splurge and ordered a 50 ft roll. The project was a real pain in the ass! The hoses were really difficult to bend, and the space that it needed to traverse was tight to say the least. They were so rigid that you needed to heat them up with a heat gun (without burning them) just to make a 45 degree bend and getting them onto the fittings was a wrestling match. In short, it took about 2 days to install before we were able to test them, and that's when the fun really began. When we first tried it out, no matter how much we wrenched on the hose clamps, we had leaks at every fitting. We tried everything, including heating up the ends and clamping with all our might, we even managed to snap a few of the hose clamps in the process.

A hose should not be clamped this tight and still leak!

Long story short, after a bunch of back and forth between Dometic and the distributor that we bought it from, we were able to figure out that we managed to buy the batch that was over spec. What happened was, the ID of the hoses is supposed to be 1.5" to fit over 1.5" fittings, well after measuring with our calipers, we discovered that they were in fact 1.6", on normal hoses this would not have been a big deal, but since these were so rigid, they could not be compressed enough to make a watertight seal (at least not with our Lavac head). Dometic tried really really hard to not believe this even going so far as to suggest using silicone lubricant to stop the leaks, when on the website it specifically states that you shouldn't use silicone anything on these hoses...DUH! Can we say last ditch effort? After a month and a half of extreme persistence while trying to convince them that it certainly was not user error, we finally were able to extract a refund and purchase new hoses. Never again would we buy from Dometic, they even had the nerve to make us send back the used batch to "test" and see if they were actually over spec. No word yet on that, but we did make sure to not clean them out before shipping, so perhaps that's why? Bad customer service and flat out denial that there could be anything wrong with their product lead us to a new supplier. With the Trident hose, our only issue was that the OD was slightly larger than the Sealand, which was already a tight fit, but all in all working with the Trident was much easier and we haven't had a leak yet. No more peeing in a bucket, could we ask for more?