thanks

pumapal809 wrote:
Thank you for your input. It's not what I'd hoped to hear but there's much to be said for wisdom gained through experience.

I have rebuilt two TTs, gutted the current one down to the bare studs.. Put in 1 inch PolyIso insulation (r-7) and added an extra 1/4" think closed cell foam (r-1) with a 1/4" gap between for a air break (air gap creates a pocket of dead air space which adds another r- .5).. So all told I have about R-8.5 which is about as good as it gets with walls that are only 1 1/2" thick..

It is not even close to a sticks and bricks for insulation and you can tell..

The PolyIso is not cheap ($20 per 4x8 sheet at the time, it is now around $28 per sheet) and it took a lot of time cutting and fitting..

I am not a winter camper, more like a "fair weather" camper and tend to camp only in the summer.. High heat and humidity does get to me so I was trying to squeeze as much insulation as possible into mine to help the A/C as much as possible.

Winter camping presents a lot of additional challenges, there ARE folks who love to winter camp but it takes a lot more preparation than insulation.. You have a lot of logistics with how you deal with staying warm and then add on top of that dealing with your water systems and keeping all of that from freezing..

Seems to be a lot of work to me but there are folks who don't mind it.. Many of those folks are not camping in the winter to save paying apartment rent, they are doing for recreational purposes..

I would think that to save money you would really have to find a very cheap campground that IS open during the winter (most northern states campgrounds tend to close for winter), that campground would have to have a non metered electric hookup (you would have to use a lot of electric space heaters to minimize propane usage).. Keeping in mind that many public campgrounds tend to cost $20-$80 PER NIGHT which would be $600-$2400 PER MONTH..

At $600 per month that is starting to get close to a small apartment rent.. Then consider the cost to retrofit your TT with more insulation and how much propane you will burn and how much time you want to use for things like frozen water, dumping tanks and such..