Thanks to YouTube, persistence, and bloody knuckles, a hot shower gets pretty close to paradise.
Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, July 12, 2025 — This morning, I had a piping hot shower in my Airstream. In fact, it was the best hot shower I have had in two years of travel in my Airstream. And thereby hangs a tale.
For the last 20 or 30 days, my shower has leaked a little, which is never a good thing, and it is a particularly bad thing in an RV, because there is a limit on the amount of water available at any given time. In addition to that, the noise it made, drip thup, drip thup, drip, drip, drip, drip, pause, thup, drip, drip, was driving me crazy, as perhaps is apparent.
That was just the beginning. In the last two weeks, the shower in my rig stopped delivering hot water. Although I can live with a drip for a while and am not entirely opposed to cold showers from time to time, I wanted to fix this immediately.
Trying to get an appointment at an RV repair facility in the middle of July in America is like trying to get a hair appointment in Washington, D.C., before a presidential inauguration.
My friend Nolan suggested I search for my troubles on YouTube, as he was certain there would be a video explaining that this is a relatively common problem, a routine issue. There would be a fairly straightforward way that even a moron like me could fix the shower. And voilà, Nolan was right. I watched the video four or five times and began to take the plumbing in the shower apart. Without the video, I would not have undertaken this, because I feared that if I pulled the shower faucet plate off, important water lines and other things would fall to the floor outside the plastic shower, and it would be almost impossible ever to hook them and bring them back up to the faucet hole in the shower complex.
The video suggested that my filter valve might be clogged. And I so hoped that would be true. But it wasn’t. I soon discovered that the filter device, which resembles a vaping pipe or spark plug, was broken, and the O-rings (it’s always an O-ring, isn’t it?) were shredded.
Nolan and his father, Dennis, were on their way to meet me for video shoots at Two Medicine Creek up near the eastern portal of Glacier National Park. I texted him, including a photograph of the stricken part, and he agreed to stop at Havre, Montana, at an Ace Hardware store (“home of the helpful hardware man”) to see if he could find a replacement. This was a dicey and risky move, of course. And you all know what I’m about to say.
Any home handyman fix requires at least two and up to four trips to Home Depot, Ace Hardware, or Lowe’s. I have undertaken 20 or 30 such projects in the course of my life, from replacing blades on a lawnmower, to replacing batteries on a riding mower, to fixing a broken electrical socket, to replacing a pilot light on a water heater — and much more. In no case, not one, have I been able to accomplish the task with a single visit to the requisite hardware store. I’ve talked with a vast number of people about this, and everyone agrees that the double and triple return to the hardware store is a basic requirement of any home repair.
Unfortunately, the part didn’t quite fit. So I had three days of cold showers, and on one occasion, even though I was permeated with dust and grit from a long hike, I had to take a sponge bath from water that I boiled on my Airstream stove — ah, roughing it.
Finally, two days ago, I took the stricken part to a larger Ace Hardware store in Helena, Montana, and almost immediately found the exact replacement.
I now knew that my leak issue was about to end. But I had grave doubts about whether that would solve the hot water problem. I thought perhaps there was gunk, if I may use a technical term, in the water line from the water heater to the shower, and there was no way that I could repair that; in fact, there was no YouTube video to address such a problem. You’d have to pull the front end of the rig apart for that.
By now, I was entirely alone in the American West. So I stripped off almost all of my clothes, including, of course, shoes and socks, and ventured (what Shakespeare calls “a poor, bare, forked animal”) into the shower apartment. I pressed the replacement part into the receptacle and to my enormous satisfaction it fit perfectly. In fact, I was even able to attach a cotter pin, which keeps the filter in place so that the pressure of the running water does not slowly press it out.
By the time I finished all of this, I was a human wreck. My knuckles were bloody, I was emotionally exhausted, and I was pretty sure that when I fired the unit back up, the hot water problem would be no better, and arguably much worse. That tends to be how things go, and that’s when you make an appointment for September 29, 2031, at an RV repair facility. As with all such crises, I thought for a moment that if I were unable to repair the thing, it might be worth just pouring kerosene over the entire RV and lighting a match. I fought off despair, toweled off, put on enough clothing to be respectable, waited 15 minutes, and turned the shower on to full hot.
To my deep chagrin, the shower put forth what I would call nicely warm water, but in that kind of trickle you get at a Motel 6 with a sign on the wall saying, “Let’s save the planet, shall we?”
I won’t say that I sat down at the bottom of the shower and wept, but I certainly felt depleted, dejected, and defeated. Just as I was reaching for the can of kerosene, I decided to adjust the shower head and tap it with a sledgehammer a time or two to see if I could dislodge some grit in the line.
It was then (and only then) that I discovered that in the late stages of the drip problem, I had turned the shower head lever until I had selected the weakest of the water delivery options — the one designed to save the planet. When I now adjusted it to full force, I suddenly had an abundance of water, and it soon became hot.
My Airstream has what is known as a tankless water heater. This means that if you are hooked up to an RV park waterline and you have the sewer line connected to the convenient sewage receptacle dangerously close to the picnic table, you could theoretically take a four-hour shower. I took about a 20-minute shower, playing with the faucet and the shower head to make sure that all of the problems were resolved. My satisfaction in having taken on this little project, and in the end triumphed, is hard to describe. It’s not quite the feeling Buzz and Neil must have had in walking on the Moon, and it’s not quite the satisfaction of publishing a book, but it’s pretty big for a techno-klutz like me.
I returned the kerosene can to its cubby and tore up the last will I wrote the other day.
This morning, when I took my shower, I lingered for a few minutes and discovered at one point that the hot water was so hot that it was almost too hot. This was one of the happiest moments of my life.
If cleanliness is next to godliness, I am temporarily in a good place.