And we never used the tank for #2 nor did we put paper into it.  Those button sensors are utterly worthless.  Now, for our new trailer, we follow the practice of no paper and no #2, unless it cannot be avoided and we never believe the level indicator.  Just keeping a kind of running guess about how much you've put into it is going to be the best you can get, unless you get one of those really expensive tank monitoring systems, that may or may not work.  I call it the Zen of tank maintenance.

See this YouTube video to show why ice in the tank is useless:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH6acEmqvcw

Water in the tank with a good biological agent to break down the toilet paper and wastes is much more likely to succeed. There are ones like TankTechs Rx, Unique Products RV Digest-It, Happy Campers, etc. These can be purchased from the links or from Amazon.

I agree that using the Black Tank Flush is helpful as the OP pointed out. If one does not have an excessive accumulation of solid matter from using too little water, that should be sufficient. A wand is useful when one buys a used RV where someone did not use good practices and the tank is clogged. Otherwise, good practices will mean that such a wand is not needed.

Good practices are to use plenty of water with #2 coupled with not emptying the tank until it is at least 2/3 full. That is where accurate gauges are helpful, or a good understanding of your water usage along with a visual check if you think it is getting full. Sometimes, you can tell by the changing sound of a flush. A nearly full tank will sound different than an empty or nearly empty tank.

So, a few things that i have learned in this forum to address this issue...

1. it may be that toilet paper has hung up on the indicators - to clean this off you may want to leave some water in the tank (and/or add a bag of ice cubes) while driving around to slosh things around enough to get it "cleaned up" (as clean as a black water tank will get!)

2. using the flush line may help

3. I have heard about a "wand" you can stick down the toilet to act as a flush / sprayer to clean the walls of the tank

In the end, you can always use a nice picture to hang over the indicator lights, eliminate the visual irritant and use the wise approach from offgrid & mjlrpod and monitor your water usage.

Hope this helpful!

I can see the level in the fresh water tank by looking under the camper at it. I can see the level in the black tank by looking down the hole. That leaves an unknown level in the gray tank.  

I fill the fresh tank whenever I drain the gray. Since the fresh and gray tanks are the same size, when the fresh is empty the gray will inevitably be full less the small amount that went in the black tank from flushes or on the ground from using the outside shower. Time to empty. I could overfill the gray tank using this method if I used the city water connection, so I only pump from the fresh tank. I don't want more total water weight in the trailer anyway. 

I never look at the little level lights, run out of water without knowing it or overflow a tank. Once you've been camping a few times you pretty much know how much water you're using anyway. I know I can go about 2 weeks by myself between dump stops or about 5 days with my wife.  She takes slightly longer showers than I do. 

Originally posted by scolesworthy I got the answer from a youtube video.  Fill up the tank with fresh water using the back water hose connection.  Then drain.  It worked.  Must have cleaned off something on the sensor.  Thank you for the replys.

Even so, that is only temporary. I have had an ongoing battle with this since we purchased our RP179 in December, 2015. I can get it working, but that only lasts until we use it again. Then it get stuck again.

The SeeLevel system is much better since it reads the level though the tank wall and does not rely on sensors stuck into the tank. It is much more expensive though which is why we don't see them on the RPods with their price point. Another solution would be to replace the tank probes with these: Horst Miracle Probe. These would be used in the black tank. Another model is used for the gray tank that does not have the shield. I have found that the fresh water tank is okay as is.

Originally posted by scolesworthy I got the answer from a youtube video.  Fill up the tank with fresh water using the back water hose connection.  Then drain.  It worked.  Must have cleaned off something on the sensor.  Thank you for the replys.

Scott, You got the answer here.  Ignore it at your own risk.  (There really isn't much risk.)  What you did will work until the next time a piece of toilet paper or whatever gets stuck on one or more of the sensors.  That may be the next time you flush or it may be in a couple of months.  You will never know if the gauges are telling the truth.  You have to learn to live without them.  Period.

TT

All of the light gauges are not to be paid attention to.  They are just selling points.  They don't work.  You learn to get by without them.  It's really not hard. 

You might get your black tank gauge to work again, or seem to, but you can not count on it being accurate for long, or, really, ever.

TT