The great thing about RVing is that there a million YouTube channels out there to help you learn things. The bad thing is that those channels often contradict each other.
When you winterize your RV, the main thing you have to do is to get all the water out of the system so that it doesn’t freeze, expand, and crack your pipes. And by the way, you should also remove any liquids inside, especially if they’re in glass bottles. That includes things like dish soap and cans of Diet Coke.
The first thing you do no matter how you’re going to winterize is to drain as much water as you can by opening the drain on the fresh water spigot and also the two low-point drains, and opening at least one faucet (some people say to open them all). One video also suggested that you then drive it around a few miles to slosh any remaining water out.
There seem to be 2 main schools of thought with the fresh water system. The first is to use an air compressor to blow all the water out of all the pipes. We don’t have an air compressor, so I ruled that one out.
The second main method is to replace the water with anti-freeze, or in some cases just to dilute the water with anti-freeze. The is a special pink non-toxic anti-freeze that is made especially for RVs. Other anti-freezes are definitely discouraged, probably because they might harm the plastics or they just might kill you if some of it gets left in your fresh water tank.
Now the anti-freeze method has two sub-methods. The first one tells you to install this bypass thing on the intake side of your pump so you can use the water pump to suck the anti-freeze into the system. I didn’t want to install anything, and I especially didn’t want to pay somebody to install anything, so I kept looking for more options.
The second sub-method I found was to use a funnel (or a cut up water bottle) to pour anti-freeze into the fresh water tank, and then use the water pump to pump that anti-freeze through the system. It appears that uses a lot more anti-freeze, but it also looks very quick and easy, so that’s what I was originally going to do.
One thing all these different videos do is tell you about how to treat the hot water tank. We have a tankless water heater and it was nearly impossible to find information about winterizing it, and what we did find was contradictory.
Vicki and I struggled for quite a bit of time trying to feed anti-freeze through the fresh-water hook up, but nothing was going in. We tried buying another funnel, and a few other things, until we suddenly realized there was a spring loaded thing that looked like its job was to prevent water flowing in unless there was a certain amount of pressure behind it. Maybe if we’d had one of those big funnels like they use in NASCAR we could have got enough pressure, but it seems like we needed to rethink.
We went into the RV and opened up the box where the water came in. My hope was we’d find a pipe we could unscrew from a connector and pour the anti-freeze into the fresh tank. But after trying that, and discovering that the inside pipes were too narrow to put our funnel into, we noticed something interesting. There was a bit of clear plastic tubing with a screw-on fitting. The plastic was slightly stained with pink. I immediately knew what that was – a tube to siphon anti-freeze out of the bottle and into the pump. All I had to do was to figure out where to connect it. After 5 or 6 false starts, I finally figured out that this nice little brass fitting on the pipe leading into the pump contained both a capped off connector and a valve. I eventually figured out the right setting of the valve (you’d think it would take at most two tries, but you’d be underestimating my ability to get things wrong) and it started siphoning anti-freeze out of the bottle and into the pump.
We ran all the taps until we saw a good stream of pink coming out, both hot and cold. That included flushing the toilet and holding down the flush until it was running very pink. We put in some of the magic liquid down the toilet that breaks up poop and toilet paper – possibly TMI but we have a clear segment on the black tank drain hose, and we can verify that it actually works.
So with all that done, we now have anti-freeze in all the pipes, and also in the grey and black tank. Although the tanks probably have a mix of water and anti-freeze, they’re big enough and the amount of water in them is so small that even if they did freeze they probably wouldn’t burst. Next we pour some anti-freeze down all the drains, and in the toilet to make sure the p-traps and the toilet ball valve are full of pure anti-freeze, not water-anti-freeze. And lastly, we removed another connector and poured about a quart of anti-freeze into the fresh water tank. Again, the fresh tank is as empty as we could make it, but there might be some residual water in there, so putting that anti-freeze in there will make sure it doesn’t freeze.
I’m second guessing myself now and wondering if I shouldn’t have run the taps for longer and get more anti-freeze in the grey tank, but I think we’re probably fine. If it looks like it’s going to get really cold this winter, I might run out to the trailer and throw another gallon down the drains.
The last thing I did was to remove the lithium batteries and turn off the two electrical shut-offs (I think one isolates the batteries and one isolates the solar panels). I asked about this on Reddit, and a bunch of people said I should remove them, a bunch said they’re fine to leave them, and a few said “might as well remove them just to be safe”, and that’s the opinion I went with. Of course I had to do this last, after the trailer was parked at the storage site. But because I wanted to make sure I knew how to remove the batteries before I took it there, I had turned off the battery isolation switch, so when we parked the RV the tongue jack was going really slowly, because it was probably only drawing power from the solar panels.
So we sadly said goodbye to the trailer for the winter, although we’ll probably visit it a couple of times to fix some of the problems I mentioned in the previous post.