Cold Weather RVing
We will be going from FL to Chicago in mid-January. I expect the trip to take 3 days. We are in a Class A 2012 Fleetwood Expedition. I've been told that our furnace will not be able to avoid our p...
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rgatijnet1 wrote:Hear! Hear! Cudos to you, you experience all the rv life and understand weather limitations . Educated people like you can help many others.
Every year we do most of our travel in the Winter months. As we have found out, a lot of other people also enjoy traveling in the Winter months because of the lack of crowds. We will usually be out for months and in Mid-January we once shared the entire Grand Canyon Village RV park with only 5 other guests.
We never have trouble finding a place to park the RV. Many times you will hear about people talking about "permanent" residents at the various RV parks. Trust me, they do not make all of those people leave during the Winter and many parks have transient spaces available during the Winter. If you are one of those that likes to schedule your stops, start calling and making arrangements now. For us, we never make reservations and always manage to find a place to park. We also carry tire chains that we have had to use to get in to and out of some RV parks that haven't cleared the roads. The highways are almost always cleared, especially if you stick with major highways as you travel.
During the Winter we always try to keep the fresh water tank topped off. We never hook up the water hose or sewer line except to empty the waste tanks or top off the fresh water. We have camped in sub zero temps and never had our tanks freeze.
They make a thermostatically controlled plug that you put in to a standard outlet and it will turn on a heater or light. This is how we keep the wet compartment heated when we travel. If you do not have a 120 volt inverter outlet in your wet compartment, it is easy enough as a DIY project or to have an electrician install a GFI for you to use when parked or while on the road.
We have roof top heat pump AC's that work down to about 32 degrees. We also have a portable heat pump AC that is our primary heat source when the temp drops below 32.
In addition to the heat pump, if we need a little more heat, we use the portable electric heaters. We very seldom use our propane furnace except maybe to take the chill off first thing in the morning. We don't really mind temps in the 60's inside the RV and we use an electric blanket at night. Our big mountain dog loves the cold and can't wait to play in the snow when we travel.
