Our water just stopped running.
Hey, so what's going on?
I think the pipes are frozen.
Oh, are you serious?
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Tis the season.
We hope you guys are staying a lot warmer than we are here. We're sending you guys all the warm wishes.
If this is your first time to our channel, I'm Kyle. -I'm Renee. -And we're HappilyEverHanks,
driving you to get out here and enjoy RV living. Hopefully we have not turned you away and scared you too much already.
All right guys, so in today's video let's talk about RV winter camping.
We're going to talk about what you can do to prepare your RV for cold temperatures.
And finally, the best part, we are going to discuss what to do if you experience frozen pipes in your RV. Yeah.
Okay so we want to give a little bit of a back...-Wait...
before we dive in let's do our, RV tip of the week.
Shout out to Barbara and Chris, from Midlife Journey, for their RV tip.
So Chris and Barbara threw out a great tip and they said,
give boondocking a try. It's easier than you think, and it could save you quite a bit of money.
Who doesn't love saving money while on the road? -Nice one guys.
So take it from the emergency nurses, we know just a couple things about emergencies,
and we want to share those with you today.
Shelter, fire. water.
Remember those when you think you might be exposed to some dangerous climate changes. -Yes.
If you don't have shelter, it doesn't matter if you don't have heat or water.
That is going to be the most dangerous situation that you will face.
So make sure you follow shelter, warmth, water.
All right, let's talk about our next segment. The things you could do to prepare your RV. -Absolutely.
All right let's talk about skirting your RV.
So if you don't know what that means, that is basically putting some kind of barrier around the bottom of your RV, to
protect underneath from wind and excess low temperatures.
Just think of it as the added protection of insulation you have in your home.
That's exactly what you're doing is you're just lining the sides of your RV,
to add that extra insulation underneath. So that those ambient temperatures outside,
aren't constantly pulling that heat away from your trailer.
Bonus tip to you guys, if you ever get caught in a situation
where you are facing the freezing temperatures, and you have no access to skirting,
you can treat it actually like an igloo.
And you can take the surrounding snow in the environment,
make a barrier along the base of your trailer to help constantly keep that heat in.
It's better than nothing. But it will actually act as like an insulation barrier.
So guys, what we like to do, when we know the temperatures are dropping below freezing. -Yeah.
We actually disconnect our water hose and just fill up our fresh tank because
if you have your fresh tank filled up, you can have running water for a couple days. -Totally, yeah.
And then, during the daytime, when it's not freezing, we'll go out and fill it back up.
Another thing that you can consider, that if you do not want to fill up your water tanks,
is you can actually buy a special heat tape, to wrap your water
hose in, to kind of keep that really insulated from the ambient temperatures outdoors. -Nice.
Our RV is considered four seasons. -Yeah. -And it has integrated, built-in tank heaters.
Which is cool. A problem that we ran into is we coincided the use of the electric heater,
with the propane heater. And where we went wrong is we created an ambient temperature within the
trailer that was warm, but we were forgetting the ambient temperature underneath us in the
belly of the trailer. -We were trying to save money by not running the furnace continuously.
Since we were hooked up to electric, we thought, let's utilize as much electric as possible.
So as the temps were dropping really really low, we were already below freezing as soon as we got to the RV park. -Yes.
I believe we set our furnace to keep the inside temperature at 60F or 65F because we thought,
'hey we'll just bundle up'. -Done. 'Wear some layers, it doesn't need to be super warm in here'.
And we stayed warm. -And we had the electric fireplace on and we had an extra space heater
running. So guess what, those other sources of heat were tricking the thermostat into not kicking on
as much as it should of. -You want to be ahead of the game on this one. So start running that
propane heater early and soon, so that you can keep that ambient temperature, underneath the trailer,
nice and toasty. Or at least as warm as you can to prevent any freezing pipes.
Like we said, this is where we went wrong. -Yes. -So we just want this to not happen to you guys.
Another bonus tip we want to bring to you guys that while we're on the topic.
If you do want to run that electric fireplace while running the furnace underneath,
coincide it by setting the fireplace about five degrees less than what you have the furnace side at.
That way, the electric fireplace never catches up with the furnace and it helps prevent the furnace from shutting off.
If the furnace is always able to stay just one step ahead of that electric fireplace,
You can be guaranteed that it's gonna continue heating that underbelly,
and prevent any situation like what Renee and I went through.
Also some other tips on how to keep the actual inside living area of your RV warm.
If you have slide outs, find out if there's little air drafts coming out from under your slides. -For sure.
We don't have anything fancy, so we just shoved a bunch of extra sheets, and blankets,
and towels underneath our slides. -Yeah. Hey, it worked though.
And you'll know because if you're sitting
in the part of the slide that is exposed to the outside you'll just be like, brrrr.
Yeah. You get that little draft coming in, and hey, if you're able to find those areas and cover them up,
more kudos to you. -Yes.
It actually helps for us if we keep our blinds shut. -Totally.
These are not fancy blinds in any way.
But if we keep them closed, it just helps with that little bit of draft coming through the window, so.
Another great consideration, if you're gonna start facing freezing temperatures, before it gets too cold,
invest in a dehumidifier. And the reason we say that is with the ambient temperature being outside,
very freezing and the warm temperatures inside, you are bound to create a lot of humidity.
It's going to be built up on the windows.
It's going to cause moisture build up through all your cabinets and all your living quarters.
So invest in that dehumidifier. Stay on top of that so you don't experience any
issues like mold or any kind of build up. -From...
Condensation
All right, segwaying into our final topic of the video, that we want to really bring to you guys.
And I think this is the grand finale that we're all waiting for. I know Renee and I weren't too prepared for this.
But we want to talk about, what happens if your pipes freeze?
So if you ever run into a situation, where your water does stop, and you're not sure what's causing it.
There's three things that you can really consider, just keep it really simple.
It could be your water tanks, it could be your water piping, or it could just be your water pump.
Even though we have a fresh tank water heater,
because we weren't skirted and it was freezing, we thought 'well
it was so cold that the water in the tank probably still froze'. -Totally.
So something very simple that I did,
and this isn't 100% guaranteed to solve your diagnostic problem but I just went under and pulled the overflow valve.
And guess what? I expected it to be frozen solid and I'd have to like really yank on the valve.
I pulled that and it easily, just water flowed right out.
So well, our next step was to actually just test the water pump.
And what we did was simply disconnect it, really easy,
we got a bucket of hot water, and we just made our own little makeshift water pump scenario.
Where we put one side of the water pump in, and we put the other side of the water pump above the water,
and we just made sure the water pump was actually doing its job correctly.
So we concluded that it was a water pipe, underneath the trailer and the underbelly, that was being the culprit of our problems.
We knew the situation had to be from the water tank to the water pump and that's exactly what it was.
So a big concern that you should know about freezing pipes
is that there's only so much expansion, that these plastic pieces can tolerate,
before they actually create little cracks or deficiencies, within the pumping system.
If you were ever stuck in a scenario like Renee and I were just stuck in, where your pipes are frozen,
we want to bring you a couple extra things that you can do to help maybe
move the process along of unthawing your pipes.
Put an extra heat source underneath the RV.
We had a small space heater that we placed underneath.
Now we didn't run this at night because we wanted to make sure we were awake
and we could check on it frequently. -Constant monitoring. -Remember.
Yeah, space heaters could be dangerous if you don't have them uh, supervised.
But we've also heard of people getting heat lamps. -Yeah. -And putting those underneath.
So if there's a way you have access to heat lamps, you could set those but
please make sure you're not setting them underneath and then just running off for the day or going to bed.
We've heard some people take a blow dryer to their pipes.
Totally. If you have a concern that you have isolated within the piping that you have access to,
you can always take a hair dryer and slowly try to unfreeze some of that frozen water.
We were very fortunate to be right next to the comfort station at the state park. So we actually had a place
to wash dishes. It was a nice, heated room. We had bathrooms.
We didn't have access to showers, so we did have to smell for like, two days.
Like I said, having bottled water was great. We also had a place
to fill up water. So if we needed to boil water to make dinner, it was great. So
you know, we were very fortunate to have those resources close by. -Totally.
Guys don't be scared to winter RV. There are so
many things you could do to prepare. And if it goes wrong and you have a frozen pipe, just take it from us,
Yeah. -It's scary, you don't know what's going on. You wish you had water, but it'll get better.
Just let it warm up slowly. That's what we want you guys to take away from this. -Absolutely.
Guys, we also have some other footage of what happened during this
scenario so follow us on instagram and you get to see some story highlights from that day. -Uh oh.
As always guys, thank you so much. We love you all. We'll see you next week.
And we hope to see you out on the road. It's HappilyEverHanks, checking out.
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