Short answer: Yup, mostly.
You CAN use the city water connection to flush MOST of your system, but you'll miss (1) the antifreeze to the pump and (2) the pump loop to the system - this is a negligible amount of antifreeze to get to most of the system. However, at that point, you can complete your dewinterization by adding water to the gravity fill/fresh tank, and firing up the water pump. Leaving some anitfreeze in the antifreeze inlet won't hurt anything (as it's locked safely away from your fresh water supply behind the antifreeze/winterization valve).
Make sure that - if you did anything to your inline water filter (like add an empty soda bottle to it), you take that into consideration and make sure you have a usable filter to install in place once you're dewinterized (we have a member who forgot, and was puzzled by a lack of pump pressure, till he realized the pump was forcing his antifreeze-soda bottle lid to block the return line from the water filter).
Note that if you added antifreeze and ran it out to your showerhead AND you have a ShowerMiser that you ran antifreeze to as well, then you may have antifreeze in the fresh water tank.
Don't forget to dewinterize to your outdoor shower and low point drains, as well. No sense in leaving any antifreeze in any part of the system where it can leach into your system through typical flow/use.
If your hot water heater was bypassed for winterization (as it should have been), wait until you've fully dewinterized before you set the hot water heater bypass back to normal usage. Note: there's no antifreeze in there, but there IS water in there that sat in the very bottom of the tank over the winter (the stuff you just couldn't get out via the outboard tank drain/anode port).
As a result, I like to sanitize my system at the start of the season (anytime the system has sat empty for a while, to be honest; small amounts of water sitting for any length of time could stand to have a little bleach run through them).
The magic ratio for sanitizing is 1/4 for every 16 gallons, 24 hour soak, though a stronger ratio gets you shorter soak time. My system takes
60 gallons (measured and verified) for the 54 gal fresh water tank and 6 gal hot water heater, so I pour a generous cup of bleach into my fresh water hose, and then fill the fresh water tank and hot water heater, and then - once the fresh tank is full (to get the mix to the right ratio) - run the pump to get bleachwater into the hot water heater and then out to each and every one of the water outlets. This gives the fresh water hose a little bleach freshening, too.
Hope this helps!
__________________
2022 Rockwood Roo 235S
15kBTU AC; 12v fridge; 1kW roof-mounted solar panels; 80 amp MPPT charge controller; 3,500w pure sine wave inverter; 30a automatic transfer switch; MicroAir EasyStart, 600ah Chins LiFePo; Honda EU2200i (with Hutch Mountain propane conversion kit) gathering dust in the storage unit.
|