Below freezing advice

Not unless it will stay low temps for a while. I would fill the water tank and disconnect the water and drain hose until it warms up above 32 degrees. The more water you have in the tanks the longer it will take to freeze.

An overnight low in the 20's may not freeze anything. A lot depends on exposure of the pipes, wind direction, duration, pressure of water in the pipes, incidental conductive heat from the trailer, and ambient temps. On the other six it may happen and there are somethings you can do to prevent it. The greatest danger is a supply line freezing and bursting. If you empty the supply pipes, it will help against that. Lamps put out a lot of heat. If you position them close to the critical areas, it will heat the pipes. Enclose the area so that the heat from the trailer helps maintain an above-freezing condition.

I think you will probably be OK but your exact situation is unknown. It will take more than a few hours at below 25f or so to ice up a pressurized 1/2" pipe.

I would open at night while you're sleeping any cabinets and any space where plumbing is located. What I worry about the most are those areas like outside showers, where the plumbing has no insulation between it and the outside air. You will probably be fine, but if your outside shower plumbing were to freeze and crack, it doesn't cost a lot of money to fix that.

We were faced with the same cold weather here in central NC. This week is DS's spring break, so we planned to camp yesterday through Sunday with my parents at our local state park. My parents have a pop-up. With the forecast of rain and below freezing temps at night, we just canceled. I was bummed!

Last year, we did the same trip on his spring break, though it was the first week of April last year. The weather then was awesome. It was like 80 or 85 every day, and not a rain drop for 4 days. Oh well, maybe next year.

I've found that when using the TT in such temps, we tend to keep it warm enough for at least half the day that nothing ever freezes. And I use it in sub 20 weather.

We have noticed that if the temps just dip to the mid 20's in the early morning, and then warm back up, we will not have any problems.

but I would be a bit concerned if my exposed cold water lines were to freeze solid after 5 or 6 hours.

I would definitely keep the furnace humming by keeping the interior temps nice and warm. That heat will radiate to the exposed exterior of your rig.

Don't know if this would make any difference, but do you have something, even some old blue tarps, that could be cut to a size sort of like a "skirting" and taped to the trailer. Certainly won't be attractive, but if you can block any wind it might help.

Even here in West TN, our beautiful 70+ degrees a couple of days ago is long gone. Back to cold, grey, cold, drizzly, cold, miserable. We were supposed to be in FL for baseball this week and had to cancel, but watched the game on MLB....lovely mid 80's, sunny, gorgeous and one in the win column....just not fair!

We camp all the time in our off-road POPUP camper which has a fresh water tank and inside plumbing for that as well as a hot water water heater etc... We also do not have any under belly membrane covering.

We do just fine by unhooking any water connections and running heat inside the trailer on the very cold nights.

We also are setup for doing a quick drain of the trailer fresh water low points which also drains the hot water water tank to some degree if we open the hot water faucet. Once all of the water gets drained from the low water point we can do a quick blow-out of the water lines using our tankless 12VDC air compressor connected to the city water inlet port using an air adapter... Then we just add some pink stuff to the couple of p-traps we have.

All of this just takes a few minutes and we can start using the water system again by just adding fresh water the next day to the fresh water tank or hook back up to city water.

Have camped thru some low single digit temps doing this here in the high country of VA-TN-NC-GA camp sites.

We also have all of our cabinets that are interconnected around our floorspace using internal small vents and use a 12VDC vent fan on one end to force air movement through all of the cabinets. this helps big time keeping our internal warm air inside our cabinets...

Not really a big deal for us camping during the winter months... Having a bigger trailer might be more of a problem...

Our winters here in Northern Neck Virginia are not harsh at all - It may get down to freezing overnite but usually warms back up the next day.

The only thing that has ever frozen up for us water forgetting to unhook the water hose connection to the camp ground pedestal one cold night.

Roy Ken

Is it feasible to use the black tank during the winter when the camper is otherwise winterized? I realize if the furnace is on it wouldn't be a problem but what about single digit temps and furnace off? Seems like I've heard of people just pouring a little antifreeze down the toilet after using it. Could the tank get damaged in that scenario?

Hi,

What are the daily highs going to be?