Our Motorhome water pump failed in France

Day 16 of our winetasting trek around the Alsace and France and our water pump has failed. The water flow has been reducing slowly over time, every since the major work on the Truma water heater, we thought the cause was debris in the water system that was restricting the flow, however, the water flow to the bathroom and toilet flush have slowly reduced to the point that it was taking a long time to fill a kettle and the toilet flush was reduced to a trickle.

Now we have no water flow, the pump is still making a noise, but no water is coming out of any of the taps.

We have fallen back on a trusty solution, a watering can full of water sat inside our back door. This reminds me of my childhood when my parents had a caravan near Lake Windermere. There was no drinking water on the site (this was the 1950s) so my parents had to drive a couple of miles north and fill large containers with drinking water from a tap behind a small door in a wall between two houses on the roadside. One of these containers was kept outside the caravan door so we had a supply of water for drinks etc. Water from the caravan roof was collected was washing up too.

Now we are back home my first job has been to find out what the problem was. I removed the Reich pump that was fitted in our Hymer, as shown here.

The pump is a Reich, 12v and should deliver 19 litres per minute at 1.4 bar, KTWC DVGW W270.

The whole unit is sealed, there is just the wire going into the top and a water outlet. Water is drawn into the bottom of the pump through a coarse plastic screen that would stop any large debris from entering.

Not much you can do with units like this, so I tested it and found that it could still deliver a small amount of water but the pump was definitely the problem. A search on the internet yielded a variety of places that sold this particular Reich pump, but many of them had no stock. Many other people reported similar problems with pumps in their motorhomes. 

After some further searching I found a similar Reich pump with a somewhat higher specification and ordered that. The new pump arrived a couple of days later and was fitted very easily.

I’m pleased to report that the pressure and flow delivered by the new pump are better than the original water pump.

I’m always interested in why equipment fails, so I wanted to know what happened to our water pump, the photos below show what I discovered when I carefully cut the Reich water pump open with a hacksaw. The cause of failure was obvious, water had leaked past the seals on the motor shafts and got into the pump housing and caused corrosion of the motors. This is likely to be a problem with submersible pumps, as a chemical engineer my preference would have been a different type of pump even though this would have meant a little more pipework.

In this case we needed a quick solution because we have another trip next week, which meant a like for like replacement. However, a change of water pump may be coming during the winter.