Cold weather RVing tips

So, let’s say you end up in a sudden freeze like we experienced in Texas in February of 2021. You may actually have a frozen situation before you’re able to turn on your furnace. One thing to consider with dauber screens is that they can freeze. What will take place is that your furnace will come on for about 15-20 seconds and shut itself off. Most likely we have an air blockage, so you’ll go outside and look at your dauber screen, and hopefully it hasn’t frozen over before the furnace came on, as we have seen. Now, if the dauber screen has frozen over before the furnace came on, there’s safety mechanisms in place preventing the furnace from coming on and staying on if there is no air flow, so try to make sure your dauber screen is free of snow and ice. 

Now let’s talk about getting water into the RV. Your hose is not protected, and we’ve only got about ⅝” wall encasing the water, so it’s going to freeze. The best thing to do while camping in cold weather is before the water freezes, fill up your holding tank, as it can handle 6”-10”, which takes much longer to get that amount to freeze. Of course, if you have tank warmers you’ll definitely have those switched on, and of course turn on your furnace. Don’t rely on your water hose. 

Now there’s an old adage as we follow in our homes, which is to open up our faucets and allow them to drip. The problem we encounter with constant dripping is the flow into they gray tank. Now let’s look over here at our stinky slinky; is it protected? No? So if we open up our gray tank and allow it to drip, that will be frozen as well. The best thing that we can do is put water in the holding tank, open up the cabinets and use the furnace as much as possible, as keeping the furnace on will keep the lines warm and help prevent a freeze up situation. 

So, if we have our D.O.T. cylinders, we can wrap them in Reflectix along with a blanket to attempt everything we can to keep the tank warmer than outside. As we all know, propane will not release from the tank when it’s cold outside, but when it’s really cold we will actually outrun the radar vaporization. If you’ve got a motorhome, you have an ASME tank, and we can use what’s called an Extend-A-Stay. The question is, how do you get additional propane whenever you run out in the night without lifting everything up and driving to get it? You hook up an Extend-A-Stay and run it off of the D.O.T. cylinder.  

And there’s your Tech Tips!

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