Winter travel

[Spittman]

We are going out 1st time in winter. What precaution should i take as far as water freezing.? going to have water in onboard tank 2000 country coach intrigue . 32 foot cooks delight. Thanks in advance.

[Busskipper]

Originally Posted by Spittman

We are going out 1st time in winter. What precaution should i take as far as water freezing.? going to have water in onboard tank 2000 country coach intrigue . 32 foot cooks delight. Thanks in advance.

Turn on the Heat !!

Where will you be enjoying winter Travel?

What will the extremes be?

Heat - Good adequate - HEAT is what is needed.

Do not leave hoses out - work out of your Tanks.

Have a few small Electric Heaters Just in case.

Quartz Halogen lights make good Heat.

Need more info,

Best of Luck,

[Bigd9]

Howdy Neighbor!

Where are you headed? We take our coach out several times a winter to go snow skiing, usually either Perfect North or Canaan Valley West Virginia. We have experienced temperatures down to 0 degrees and survived. How?
1. use water from our full water tank.
2. add heat down in the wet bay in the form of two 200 watt hearers set to come on at 40 degrees.
3. indoor/outdoor remote thermometer to be able to "see" what the temperatures are down there.
4. closely monitor the propane tank level.
5. Have a shovel handy
6. Have a hair blower handy (last year the door froze shut and I had my granddaughter use her dryer to thaw it enough to open it)
7. use a dehumidifier to remove all of that moisture inside the coach
8. know your coach. In my last coach I had to use some heat tape to wrap around a few water pipes that I couldn't heat any other way.
9. At very low temperatures you will need electricity hookups.
10. have a escape plan just incase things suddenly go south and you loose all heat.

Keep the fuel tank as full as you can. Once we were stuck in traffic for several hours due to a accident and had to run the generator. Know what you will do if this happened and people start knocking on your door wanting to go to the bathroom.

Picture was taken this past February. Note the satellite dish. Its sitting on a 3 foot tall tripod. The snow was so deep a drift was partially blocking the door and my skinny granddaughter had to squeeze out and shovel the snow away.

[NITEHAWK]

Also, I would recommend propping open any floor level cabinets that have water lines running thru them. This lets heat get inside.

[2cyber71]

In 22 yrs of RVing, I leave Pennsylvania in cold weather and head south winterized all the time. No water either, nothing. I only dewinterize in Virginia or South Carolina depending on the weather when I get there. On the way back the same. This year we winterized in South Carolina Jan 13th.
Got home and it hit -6f the next night here.

[letsride4]

I am been using 4 different motors over the last 23 years to go snowmobiling. We are always parked at the top of a pass or end of a road, never any hookups. -25°F does happen and in the teens below 0 is fairly common. I have always had full use of my water and stayed warm in all my motorhomes. My current Country Coach is has not yet been tested in real cold weather, but none of my other three were near the quality of coach as the Country Coach. Make sure you have plenty of fuel!!! If your coach is heated with propane, you will use a lot of propane when it gets cold. If you are going to be in cold heating with propane for more than just a couple nights, I would recommend you have your propane system so you can run from 20 or 30 lbs bottles in addition to the on board tank. If heating with diesel, be sure and have adaquate fuel on board. Adding salt to the black and grey holding tanks is a low cost way to raise the freezing point of those tanks. If you have all three tanks in one bay and there is an outside shower in that bay see if you can take the shower head off and put the hose in the fresh water fill port. If not you might want to rig up a hose so you can add hot water from the water heater into the fresh water tank. Adding 20 or more gallons of hot water to the fresh water tank every day will go a long way toward keeping that water bay area above freezing. If you are going to be plugged into shore power that would make life easier than where I have camped, but it certainly can be done without shore power. I have always had a small generator that can run hours on end to keep the batteries from going too low. Cold weather is a double whammy on the battereis. Batteries have way less capacity, and the heating systems has to run a lot. I installed cataytic heaters in my first motorhome and moved then to # 2 & # 3, but did not keep them for the country coach. Having some form of additional heat is advisable for a couple reasons. They can add addition capacity to your normal heating system and provide some heat should your main system fail. Having aluminum foil bubble wrap on the inside of the windshield and front windows really helps reduce heat loss. Those pillows that fit into the overhead vents and sky lights reduce heat loss. Have plenty of warm clothes as you never know what might happen. Don't let people scare you into to thinking it can't be done, because the people I snowmobile with and I have been doing it for years.