This blog post will show you where to find your water pump on a Coachmen Orion T20CB and how to access it.

This post won’t show you how to exactly unscrew it, take it off and install a new one. You can find those videos on YouTube.

My water pump broke. I always heard the noise from the bathroom area but I never cared where it is until this day. The motor started giving up a bit ago but always got better until it didn’t. No sound, no movement, no nothing. I needed to replace it.

What did I do? Googled it… but the only thing I found out was that the water pump is at different places in each unit. It could be under the bed, behind a storage cabinet, under the shower, in the kitchen cabinet, etc. It could be basically anywhere. It seems like only the people who assemble these units know where the water pump is exactly. But! They don’t have to work on it so they don’t really care where they place it. How difficult mine will be to access? That is for me to find out.

I went to the manufacturer’s website, but the only thing I found is that the model of my water pump is Shurflo 4008. They have a nice manual on how to install these pumps but it doesn’t say where it is on your rig. So, I contacted Coachmen to ask them if it is under the shower. I didn’t want to remove panels with staples until I knew exactly where to find it.

I got an answer today that it is indeed under the shower, accessible from the back storage on the left. Well… it’s not there! You can see in the picture on the left what’s under the shower. It’s basically the drainage and water pipes for the shower. Nothing else.

So we had to dig more. I was thinking it’s behind the panel that says “LOW POINT DRAIN” (I had a post about this in the past, but then I didn’t have to remove the whole panel).

We decided to remove the Low Point Drain panel, 3 screws, the fourth on the top right corner was not available, so we just turned the panel to access the pump.

The space was very narrow and tight, right next to the freshwater tank, under the bed. There was no way to fit a screwdriver in there to remove the bad pump. We used a very small hand screwdriver, which worked. 

Then I realized that since this is under the bed, we can get to it from the inside by removing the corner panel from under the bed. The panel was stapled, so I don’t think it was meant to be removed, but we removed it anyway.  Then we got closer to the pump, from the other side but the space here was still too narrow to work on this side alone. 

Basically you need both sides open to access the pump better. It took a couple of hours but we were able to change it and now I have a working water pump again! 

When I told my boondocking friend that my water pump broke, he asked me if I have a spare. I never thought of having a spare water pump but from now on I will. I bought two pumps, so I will always have one in hand if it breaks. 

If you are interested in how to actually install a water pump, you can find a video like this. But this is really not the hard part. The hard part is to locate the pump and access it.