Barking and Clucking

A waste of an opportunity.

Remember a few posts ago I mentioned that I was purchasing a 15 gallon Barker waste water tank? Well it arrived, and quite frankly I am underwhelmed. The cost of these units seems extraordinarily high compared to the amount of thought that actually went into the design of the unit. Please understand this is not a complaint about quality, the tank and the components are made of quality materials, rather me just shaking my head and clucking at the poor user interface. First, the tank comes complete with a 1 ft section of hose, far too short to reach the gray water outlet on my rather small Scamp. Three to five feet would be far more useful for most people. Second, it came with a 3"solid cap, and a 3" discharge cap for dumping waste water, a 3" by 4ft wire wound coiled vinyl tube, and a hose clamp. Nice except the tube does not fit over the discharge cap. No amount of force could make it fit. Now I see this as a quality control problem too. Did anyone at Barker try to assemble these? Third, the so-called tow handle. Supposedly this is designed to wedge under the tank's molded plastic handle and allow someone to tow it to the dump station. Really? It has no mechanical attachment to the tank. From my early assessment, towing this along most camp ground roads could easily dislodge the handle from the tank. (Please reply if your experience is different) Finally other than a cap tether, which broke after only a couple of uses, the lack of any storage or attachment points for these various accessories. Would it have killed them to mold in a place to store the hose and handle, or add a tether to the garden hose cap at the top of the tank?

Problem solving: I can't do much about the missing storage points, but I did find a cheap alternative to the ill fitting 3" dump hose. WalMart has a $3.47 cap that has a standard garden hose attachment point. Now since this will always be a grey water tank I think the garden hose outlet will be plenty adequate for dumping. For the price of these tanks I think that the manufacturer should offer this instead of the plain Jane cap that comes with the tank, and they should probably make sure hoses fit the caps they were intended for.