“Stay Toasty in Your RV When It’s Cold – Never Seen Before Tips.” To you folks who watch this article, I hope you implemented many of the things I showed you in that video because if you did what we’re going through right now, you probably are in pretty good shape. But since we’ve been going through this recent cold snap that has dived down deep into Texas and New Mexico and all the Central, there are some other things that I want to bring up right now.
Right now, we’re down here in RGV in our winter spot, and even us being eight miles away from the Mexican border, we’re experiencing record temps just like you guys are, but not near as cold as a lot of you are experiencing. Some of you are experiencing single-digit temps, freezing rain, ice, snow, etc. So, I need to give you a few more tips that may help you guys get through this freak storm. get your coach ready and have it prepared so that when these kinds of events happen, you’re ready to go. You’re not caught unawares and saying, “Oh my God, what do I do now?” But because we are experiencing this freak storm, I want to ensure you guys have as much information as possible to help you get through this.
Number one, when you see a cold snap or a cold front like this coming in and you see it in the forecast, they usually give you days or a week in advance that that coming. The first thing you do is fill up your propane tanks. Could you make sure they are complete? Also, if you have a gas coach, a motor home, or a diesel pusher, for that matter, make sure that you have topped off your fuel tank. I’ll get into more of that later.
Number two, I want to take the scenario of you being parked in a campground, having reservations, and you being parked in a campground. Being in the campground, you’ll be hooked up to city water. We’re thinking of boondocking now. We have to be self-contained. We cannot rely on outside water, so you fill your fresh tank. If the temperatures drop to about 28 degrees or lower for several hours, like 10 to 12 hours or more, or several days, you first want to disconnect your water. And I mean everything: your regulator, your hoses, your water softener, your Camco blue filter, your inline blue filter, whatever water system you have outside. You want to disconnect that, drain all the water out of it, and store it. From this point forward, when we have a front like this coming in, this kind of event, you need to start thinking of boondocking. We need to get self-contained and not rely on city water and possibly no electricity.
You want to get all of your water disconnected, drained, and stored away because the campground you’re in will turn that water off. They’re going to turn the whole campground water off. They don’t want their pipes freezing, either. Now, if you happen to be in your RV site or you’re at a location where you can control the water, you can put heat sleeves and all that type of Stuff on your hoses, wrap all your filters, your water softener, you can do all that. But 95% of you must be equipped to do that. This thing just sprung up, and we have these cold, deep temperatures that will last for days and days, and that campground is going to shut that water off. So, disconnect all of your water. If you don’t, your hoses will freeze, they’re going to split, and your regulator, if it gets below freezing, nine times out of ten, a frozen regulator will be ruined, and you’ll have to replace it. So it’s just best to put it all away. If you have a heated base and you’re running your furnace, the furnace will keep your bays warm.
And you will not have to worry about your black and freshwater tanks freezing. Now, we do not have a heated base for us and many others, and we have two wet bays. You can see my central wet bay right here, and here’s the other one for my half bath. So I have two bays with tanks, black tanks in both, a leading water tank, and all that, but I don’t have a furnace to keep them warm. Now, you can see here that I put a round metal utility lamp with a 100-watt bulb in my big wet bay. I clamp that up in the back; you can see it there. I run the cord out the bottom and an extension cord over to that, which will keep my bay at 51 degrees. In my half-bath bay, you can see I have a smaller version. This is a five-and-a-half-inch metal utility lamp with a 100-watt bulb that keeps everything warm. And I just plug that right into my inverter. Last night, it got down to 24 degrees here, and I have been as cold as 17 degrees. With these two lamps, it will keep my base at 51 degrees.
How do I know that? Well, I have a Bluetooth sensor in each of those bays. I have one in the large bay and one in my half-bath bay, and you can see right here that I have a monitor in the kitchen that monitors the temperature of both of those bays. I can glance over at my monitor and see precisely the temperature of what’s going on inside those bays. So let’s say something happens to one of those bulbs that burn out or whatever, and I’m in the coach, and I see that temperature dropping down 45, 42, 41. I know automatically that the bulb has gone out. I go outside and replace the bulb, bringing it back up to 51 degrees. Now, I have done many other things to insulate that wet bay and, again, that video that I just told you about in the beginning; I’ll put a link to it later. But I showed you in that video all the work I did there to insulate and keep that wet bay nice and warm. So, if you want the details, you can watch that video again. But those lamps are a great way to keep your wet bays warm when you do not have heated bays from your furnace.
The next thing you do is fill your water and freshwater tank and drain all your black water. We may be going through this for days and days and days, right? So, we want to start with empty tanks and fill our freshwater tank. Let’s talk about electrical power. So again, you’re in a campground; you’re plugged in. If rain and sleet and ice and snow begin to hit your area and all around you, power lines start to break, tree branches fall on lines, and or what have you, maybe the electricity demand—I mean, everybody’s demanding electricity—what these power companies are going to do is you’re going to end up experiencing blackouts. And now you don’t have water because the campground turned off the water, and you don’t have power.
Well, we’ve taken care of the water because we now have water in the fresh tank, but the electrical part is what we need to deal with now. If you are running electric heaters like Jack and I do, we rarely use our propane furnace. We keep our coach warm with electric heaters, but we need electricity to run our electric floor heaters if we lose power or have a blackout. That means you need a backup plan. And that backup plan to heat your coach will be your propane furnace. And I know some of you already use your propane furnace, and that’s fine, but I’m trying to address those who don’t have propane, don’t use propane, ran out of propane, whatever, and you’re using your electric heaters, and now you don’t have electricity. Just stay with me here and hear me out.
So think about this: you’re in your RV, and the power starts to go out. Now, you have no city power coming into the coach. So that means you cannot use your electric furnaces anymore, and now you’re forced to use your propane furnaces. That’s why I initially said to ensure your propane tanks are complete. Okay, so now we’re using our propane furnace and don’t have electricity coming in. Your propane furnace will operate off of your batteries. It’s DC, runs off of DC power, and generally speaking, a propane furnace will draw about 9.5 amps. So that means that when drawing 9.5 amps and running that for 10 hours, you will be using about 90, 95 amps of power from your batteries. So stick with me here; this will give you just an example because everybody’s battery bay will be set up differently. I will narrow this down to a common denominator that will be easy to explain.
So let’s have two six-volt golf cart batteries, and they’re wired together. Now you have one big giant 12-volt battery to draw from and power your furnace, and again, your furnace is drawing 9.5 amps. So what’s going to happen is you’ll start drawing down the power of your batteries, and you do not want to bring your batteries down below half. You only have 115 to use. You’re running your furnace, and it’s drawing down the batteries. Now, what are you going to do? One way to approach it is if you have clear skies and sun, you could use solar energy to recharge those batteries. It will be slow, but it will recharge those batteries. Jack and I have a 240-watt portable solar panel, but you know, for most of you folks, you need more preparation for that. We’ve got one panel; many rigs out there have solar, but most of those caught in a freak storm like this need to prepare with solar to charge and all that type of Stuff. So we have to go to the second option, which is your generator. Your generator is a good option; that’s what you have it for, so if you have no power because of Blackouts and you’ve been running your propane furnace, pulling down your, you know, drawing down on your batteries. You start up your generator, so let’s go into this generator thing a tad deeper.
Okay, once you start your generator, you’re bringing full power back to the coach. So now you can turn on your floor and your electric floor heaters again, and it’ll automatically start charging the batteries again. Well, it’ll be automatic if you have an auto-transfer switch, which our coach does. So when we start the generator, it automatically switches from shore power to generator power.
Now, some of you may not have an auto-transfer switch. There are several coaches and RVs out there that still need that. You’ll have your generator and shore power plug that you plug into the pedestal, but that pedestal’s not working anymore. We have a blackout; you have to plug some generators in manually. So if you have that kind of generator and you’re experiencing a blackout, what you do is you unplug your power cord to the pedestal where you usually get shore power, just unplug that, and if you want, just wind it up and put it back. And usually, in that same electrical bay area or somewhere near the generator, there’ll be a designated outlet for you to plug your generator in.
Okay, so if you have an automatic transfer switch, you can start up the generator, and it’ll automatically switch, bring power to the coach, and charge your batteries. If you don’t have an automatic transfer switch, pull the pedestal plug, plug the generator into its designated plug, and start the generator.
Now, a quick tip about starting your generator: it’s always best, before you switch to generator power, to turn off all the heavy loads, and for me, I turn all the loads off inside the coach—whatever I’m running in the coach, I turn them all off. Then I turned on the generator because I did not want any surge of power coming in and possibly hurting anything in the coach. So, it’s a good idea to unplug everything, start the generator, and let it warm up for about five minutes. Let it get up to a steady RPM; it’s running smoothly now, and you can return to the coach and start turning things back on.
By design, generators are made to have a 20-30-second delay when they first come on. As soon as you start that generator up, don’t expect immediate power. It takes about 20 or 30 seconds to deliver power to the RV.
So let’s say that you took your batteries down to the 50% mark, you’ve been using them all night, you wake up in the morning, you know, you’ve been running your propane furnace and your refrigerator or what have you, and your batteries are at 50%. Now that you start up the generator, it’s going to take many, many, many hours to bring those batteries back to full charge. So it would be best if you know that you’re going to be in this for the long haul; I mean, the forecast is showing days and days of below-freezing temperatures, single digits, and so on, come up with a plan on the schedule of recharging you need to do to keep your batteries topped off.
So it may be good for you to bring your batteries at 70% and then turn on the generator and start to recharge them again. Once you’re getting power into the coach, you can run your floor heaters, as I said before. But the deeper you drain into those batteries, the longer it will take to recharge them. That’s why I say repeatedly, get your manuals, learn your coach. Every RV is going to have its personality. Every battery bay is going to be set up differently. Some will have six batteries, some will have one, some will have two, some will have deep cycles, and some will not. So you’ll have to know the personality of your coach’s battery bay to learn how far to bring it down before you have to start recharging it. So you don’t bring them below 50% and don’t have to wait hours and hours before they’re good again. So remember to start paying attention to how that works with your RV.
Another thing about the motorhome, as I mentioned earlier, whether it’s a diesel pusher or a gas coach, is that I said to make sure the fuel is, you have lots of energy, and fill up the tank. And the reason is, is that when you start running your generator and powering some of these minimal things, you’re going to be running about half a load on that generator, maybe a little bit more, but your generator is going to be drinking probably about a half to three-quarters of a gallon of fuel an hour. So that’s why you want plenty of fuel to take you through the long haul if you do this for several days.
The generator will turn off once that fuel tank reaches a quarter of the tank. That’s by design. The generator will Only use the top three-quarters of the fuel tank. Once it gets to the lower quarter, it shuts off. I covered all this in great detail in my three-part series on how to take care of a generator. You can watch that series if you want to know more about how a generator works and how to take care of it. It’ll tell you just about everything you need to know.
One last thing about electrical: as a precaution, this is what I do. I go outside to where my EMS plugs into the electrical pedestal if I’m running off of regular campground electricity, and I’ve got that cord in there. I wrap that in Saran wrap, then I wrap it in a towel, and then I wrap that towel in more plastic. And I do that because of cold temperatures; I wonder whether we will have a blackout. I don’t know whether I will have to go to my generator, but if that thing’s plugged in, I do not want it to be getting snow and ice and rain and turning into ice and freezing all around that area, possibly ruining my EMS. As a precaution, I do that for a little added insurance to protect my EMS. Some of you may have a surge protector; I highly recommend an EMS for whatever you use. Everybody knows that, but whatever you have connected there, protect it with some plastic. Keep the ice, snow, and rain off of it.
If you’re in a campground, you’ve made reservations, and right in the middle of all this, your reservations are up, and you have to move, and the last three or four days, or whatever, you’ve got snow up there, you’ve got ice, it’s been raining, and that’s all frozen up there on top of your slide toppers. Bringing those slides in with all those toppers frozen solid is not a good idea. It’s a great way to crack and tear that up. It’s best to get all that off before you pull your slides in. This event has been going on for several days. It will be windy and very bitter cold; the better choice would be to bring the slides in. That way, not only do you not get all that accumulated snow and ice and all that stuff on top of your slides, but now that your slides are in, the coach is much smaller and very easy to use. You’ll use a lot less heat. and a lot less energy. That is the best thing to do in a terrible cold event.
Your main awning over your patio and any window awnings over the side of your coach or RV should have already been drawn up and stored away anyway. Those should not be out on your entry door. We had a phone call with a friend. They’re not far from us here, but it rained last night and got down to 24 degrees; they’re not under a protective cover like we are. They are out in a typical outdoor campground site, and it rains, and all that water runs down inside and around their door, and then it freezes. When they got up this morning, they couldn’t open up their door from the inside. They had to kick the door open to break the ice to get the door open.
So one thing you can do there is take regular alcohol and pour it on a rag, and liberally put it all around the door jam of your door and all the latches, all those areas, the hinges, everything. Just wipe and saturate that whole area with alcohol, then close the door for the evening. That may help prevent the ice from freezing around those areas and lock that door.
And this is another biggie. Another thing you can do to the outside of your coach if you do not have step covers on your steps. You know, when you buy these things, they’re metal steps. I have always advocated getting carpet step covers for many, many reasons. But if you don’t have them on those steps now in this cold weather, you know what happened, right? Just like that door. It rains, sleets, snow, and then those steps will be covered in ice in the morning. And it would be so easy for you to walk out that door and hit those metal steps; that’s just an accident waiting to happen.So we have carpet covers on our steps, and I highly recommend you do too for the entire year; they’re a big safety thing if it’s snowing and icing like it is.
This little update piece, these two combined give you everything you need to know to get through these events. Please get your manuals, read them, and get to know your RV if you haven’t done that already. Knowing all the details of how your coach works is essential so that when these things happen, you know precisely what to do. You’re not pushing the panic button; I hope that doesn’t fall in on you.