Embrace the Hack
Spend enough time surfing the World-Wide-Web and you’re sure to find some special tip or trick that will change your life or at least divert your attention for a few minutes. The value of these hacks is proportional to the problem they solve. You may never install a bath loofah in a car tire to keep the psi stable. You might not see the value in pre-soaking your Dr. Scholls inserts in Dawn dish soap if you’ve never suffered from overly stinky feet. So…let’s just say that some of the hacks are a lot less valuable than others. But one day, some TikTok, Reel, Vine will rock your world.
Laying on my back in the pass-through storage compartment of our camper, wearing a headlamp and testing the limits of my own contortionability, I was trying to track down the source of a slow drip on the back side of our water control panel. A months-long dribblet bent on maintaining a shallow puddle where I want only desert. Oh what I would have given for a golden nugget of knowledge to remedy the issue.
I’ve reached an unspoken stalemate with the unknown source of the leak. So far it has deigned indifference to a general hand tightening of ALL the fittings on the back side of the water panel. I can’t verify that my wrist, bent as it was at an awkward and inverted 28 degree angle, applied a consistent torque setting to each of the plastic fittings. I was just happy that the unseen source wasn’t angered enough by my fumbling to increase the flow of H2O.
I’ve had plenty of time to contemplate numerous remediation options, including drilling a hole in the floor near the source and channeling the water out the bottom of the camper. I couldn’t find appropriate schematics anywhere on YouTube for such a solution so I’m holding that one as a last resort. With this option however, Donelle threatened to hide the drill… and my Crocs, as she has spent hours plugging holes and taping seams to critter proof our domain.
Standing outside the camper I finally landed on a genius idea, with no help from the internet, to put some sort of item in the general area of the water in an effort to endure its pesky advances. Unable to contain my enthusiasm, I outlined my plan with Donelle, keeping the technical description to a minimum so as not to appear to be bragging about my engineering prowess. She said, “You mean a ‘drip pan’?”
“Well, I suppose some might call such a device a ‘drip pan’,” my inside-my-own-head voice said in a tone of chiding mockery.
As I continued to mull the issue and search for a suitable drip pan I realized this had to be next-level, scientific and worthy of taking into aquatic battle. It had to have a slight degree of flexibility and be no more than an inch or so tall. And capable of containing gallons of water should the drip decide to go on the offensive.
And then it hit me. Light shone down like intellectual manna. The hack of all hacks, worthy of the bandwidth it will someday occupy in online perpetuity — an ice tray! I now know the drip originates somewhere over the fourth ice cube spot on the left. Sometimes it overflows into many of the other ice cube compartments in the tray before I remember to pull it out and empty it. One step closer to closing this case.
This is just one of many little tricks our new home has played on us since we began our journey. We are thankful that we haven’t had some of the issues that bombard our reels. We are also very grateful for other campers’ expertise as they have kept our issues to the molehill level. Problems, and subsequent hacks, are all apart of the experience.
In lieu of finding the leak, I have moved on to creating a refrigeration technique to freeze the drips into round shapes that would fit nicely in my tumbler. Or, as Donelle suggested, calling someone with more experience than we have to fix it. I think it is time for a beverage.