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Are you thinking about updating the standard kitchen sink that came installed in your RV?
While our RV kitchen sink was in decent condition, we figured a single basin sink would be more functional and lucked out by finding a new one on eBay for $20, which you can see installed in our tiny kitchen reveal. But before we could install our new kitchen sink we needed to get the old one out.
Below, I will explain how to remove the kitchen sink from your RV. It may be a bit different depending on the make and model of your RV, but the basic concept should be similar.
How to Remove Your RV Kitchen Sink
It’s important to note that all RVs are different, so while this is how we removed our sink from the kitchen in our 2008 Tiffin Allegro Open Road 32LA, yours may be slightly different. If you find yourself unsure of something, we’d recommend reaching out to your RV Manufacturer to ask them about best practices.
The first thing you want to do before even looking at the sink is to turn off the water pump (this can usually be done by flipping a switch within your coach). I generally take it a step further by turning off the 12-volt power switch located in the RV. This will ensure that the water pump will not have any power, therefore can’t turn on.
If you’re connected to city water you’ll want to disconnect it.
Now that you know your water pump is off (or you’re disconnected from city water) you’ll want to go to the sink you’re working on and turn on the faucet. This should clear out the pipes and make sure water doesn’t spill on you. I’d still recommend bringing a towel with you to put on the ground underneath the pipes you’ll be disconnecting.
Watch a video showing how I removed our RV kitchen sink
While we didn’t get many photos during this process, we do have a quick video showing how we removed our RV kitchen sink:
Socket Wrench Set (if you don’t have sockets and a socket wrench it may be best to purchase a set)
The first thing I did was cut through the caulking around the top of the sink with my utility knife. You’re going to need to put a decent amount of pressure behind the knife to cut through the caulking. Make sure not to put too much pressure, because you want to avoid causing damage to the sink or the countertops. If you’re planning to replace the sink and countertop completely you may not need to worry so much about it :).
After you have the thin layer of caulk cut you will want to go underneath the sink. There you should find a drain pipe (possibly 2 depending on your sink) along with the hot water in and the cold water in.
These are the three plumbing lines (4 in our case, considering the 2 drain pipes) you will want to disconnect. They may be attached pretty tight, you’ll want to have a pair of pliers (or vice-grip) handy in order to loosen them up. Once I had ours completely loose I made sure everything was completely detached by separating the pipes from the sink. By doing this I ensured the sink would pull out when I was ready.
Your plumbing is disconnected and your caulking is cut, one more step to go and you’re finished. A little heads up though, this next step is probably the most uncomfortable.
If you lie on your back and look up toward the bottom of your sink you should see brackets that secure the sink to the countertop. Our brackets had 8mm heads on the bolts, so I grabbed my 8mm socket and socket wrench to loosen them up.
These brackets act similarly to the bolts located on a Christmas tree stand, so when you loosen them they may fall. Be careful and don’t let them fall on your face.
I used my pliers to loosen the brackets that didn’t fall on their own.
We labeled a quart-size plastic bag with a sharpie for the kitchen sink and placed the brackets and bolts in there. You don’t have to follow this step but we’ve found it makes it easier to stay organized.
The last thing to do is to stand up, stretch out a bit, then pull the sink out.
Boom, you’ve removed your RV kitchen sink!
Not so bad right?
We hope this post helps give you the confidence to remove your RV kitchen sink. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for different ways to remove the sink in your RV, we’d love to hear them below.
Great info. Our sink cracked and we need to replace it. Do you know where to buy sinks for Allegro 2008 Motorhome?
We bought our sink on Ebay and it said it came from an RV, but didn’t specify a model. As long as you measure the dimensions of your sink you should be able to replace it with any sink that has the same dimensions. One thing I realized when doing research is that our sink wasn’t nearly as deep (or wide) as standard sinks and I found myself looking more at bar sinks to find similar measurements. This was mainly because I wanted a single basin sink vs. double and it was more difficult to find. Of course this was 2 years ago and the options seem to have gotten better for RVs since then. You can always search Amazon or RV specific retailers like etrailer.com or RVupgrades.com. You may even want to reach out to Tiffin and see if they can order it for you. We ordered our skylight from them. Hope that helps!