Hey everyone, what’s up? Okay, so today, I will share how Jack and I stay warm in our RV during the winter. I have developed some great tips, and I am very confident you haven’t seen most of them before. So we’re going to get into that right now.
Okay, let’s get right to it. I know—you don’t have to worry about staying warm in the winter because, like us, many of you go down south for the winter. But you know, you sometimes run into cold temperatures wherever you travel. That’s how it is; it doesn’t matter how well you plan; you can’t fool Mother Nature sometimes. So, the things that I’ve developed and made for our coach to keep us warm, you’ll love some of these ideas.
The first thing we need to do is go to Outdoor Products, so let’s go! Okay, here we are at Outdoor Products, and the first place we will go is in the plumbing department. You can see right here that this is where they carry the plumbing foam covering to insulate pipes. This is what you’d typically use in a house. I will go ahead and get half-inch, some half-inch pieces, and I will get some three-quarter-inch pieces. And depending on the coach that you have, you may want to go with one inch. Also, while getting these foam insulation tubes, ensure you get a couple of foil tape rolls because you’ll need that, too.
Okay, we’re still in Outdoor Products and went into the building supplies. We’re over here in the insulation area, and you can see how they sell these big sheets of blue insulation board. Now, this blue insulation board is a half-inch thick. We’re going to buy three sheets of this. You’ll notice that these boards have dull and foil-reflective sides. You can put either side facing the airspace, but if you want more insulation, place the reflective side towards the outside, towards the airspace.
Okay, right down from where we saw the insulation board, you will see these, and it says “faced.” What faced means is that it has a paper backing. We’ll buy one roll of face, but we’ll remove this paper backing to use it in the coach. Now, a bit further down from the insulation boards and the fiberglass insulation, we also have this reflective material. Some people call it Reflectix, but you can see it’s a skinny material. I’m not a big fan of this, but I know a lot of you and a lot of other RVers use this. They’ll put it in their windshield, on the side of their windows. I wouldn’t say I like living in a cave, but if you want to use it, you can also get it in the insulation area at Outdoor Products.
So we just got back from Outdoor Products, and I bought three foam insulation boards, several tubes of that plumbing insulation, and two rolls of foil tape. Now, I’ve already done the projects I will show you. I did these four years ago, and we have been implementing these projects and these DIY upgrades to help us keep warm for years now. But we’re going back to each section, and I will share with you what I did and how I did it. Since we’re already outside, let’s go over here on the driver’s side under the slide, and I’ll show you the first tip.
So here we are on the driver’s side, and this is where our giant slide is. It’s 16 feet. And as you all know, those of you who have a slide like this, up underneath the slide where it comes out, you have your seal right there. But you know and have probably experienced, boy, when it gets cold, especially when it’s windy, that wind will whistle through these slide seals, and you’ll get a big draft up inside the coach. You can sometimes feel the wind go in there.
First, I took these foam pieces and tucked them up inside that slide. I do that down, so when we arrive somewhere, it is automatic. What I do, whether it’s warm in the summer or cold in the winter, is pop these in, and I do that for two reasons.
Number one, it seals the heat in the summer and cold in the winter, and any drafts there keep dirt from accumulating. Now, the second thing I did was make these insulation boards right here. Now, when you open up the slides, you can see a big open area here, and we have a rack and pinion slide system. You can see that right up underneath here. So in the summertime, people are driving up and down dusty roads, and all that stuff and the dust gets inside this area into my mechanisms for my rack and pinion.
In addition, in the wintertime, you get many drafts and wind blowing up inside, making the floor even colder. So what I did is I took a piece of cardboard, went dumpster diving, and I cut this shape out, and I took two of those pieces of foam board, wrapped them all up in foil, and then I take them and pop that in there. Then I make a separate piece and that goes to the bottom. So now, this whole area cannot get dust, and it blocks the draft. And this right here, these two things, make a huge difference.
Let me show you what I did to the other side. You can see this is the other slide mechanism, but the same thing: I put it up in there, hit it, and put that block in there, and voila, you’re done. So every time I set up, these go in automatically. So now, we’re on the little slide on the passenger side, and you can see I’ve done the same thing here. Yes, it has seals, but this gives some added protection. When we get ready to go, I pull these out and slip them into the bay.
Okay, here we are at the wet bay, and people are always concerned about how to keep their water from freezing. We do not have heated bays, and you know how fussy I am about water, right? I got it triple-filtered and softened, and I don’t want any freezing issues. So, I insulated every single bay door with that board. That’s the first thing I did. I could have used a little adhesive on the door and then pressed it in. Still, I decided not to do that because I was afraid that, well, maybe, you know, if we ever sell this coach or when we do sell this coach, the new owner may not want this in here, and he’ll peel it off, and then you’re going to have all those splotches thereof adhesive.
So I carefully cut this very tight so it snaps and stays put. I did some tests before and after putting these boards in. I used my infrared thermometer tester; the base was 43 degrees inside. After I put in this board, before the board, it was in the 20s. So this helped insulate and keep the inside underneath in the basement, in all the bays, a lot warmer. So that’s the first thing I did.
The second thing I did, as you can see, is that our wet bay is a plastic tub. It’s all plastic down here on the bottom, up on the sides, and it goes back up in there. But this plastic here, I mean, even though it’s thick, when it gets cold, you know, it can magnify the cold. So what I did is I insulated the whole outside of this tub. I used the insulation board and did it on the outside of this tub. I put adhesive; I put the blue board up there. I made it, and I boxed it all up underneath. So after I had it cut out, adhered to the bottom, taped it, and put the bolts, I bought some 3M rubberized material—three cans—and I went underneath, laid on my back, and rubberized that whole outside shell. Man, what a difference that has made!
Okay, set your wet bay upright and be done with it. So if you want to see the details, you can go there. I also went in here, and I insulated all of the piping. Can you see that? This is where I first started putting this. I took this cover off right here. I completely removed this, and I put all up inside here, all the way back, all up in— I don’t know if you can—yeah, there you go, you can see that. Do you see all that? I insulated all the walls. Do you see this here? I also did all of the pipes with the insulation and foam tubing. So this wet bay is insulated now to keep it warm.
I use this lamp right here to give it more protection. I keep this lamp clamped up there. I run the extension cord down through the hole where my water hoses and stuff like that come, and I run this to an electrical outlet with an extension cord, which has a 100-watt bulb in it. You can get these at Outdoor Products. I clamp it up in there, and it has an on-and-off switch. And I am not joking—that will keep this bay about 48–50 degrees when it’s 17 degrees out here.
Now, how do I know that? Well, I strapped it to the top of my water filter. This is my Bluetooth sensor here. It comes with a monitor and two sensors. I keep one of these sensors in the refrigerator, giving me an accurate reading just by looking at the monitor. What’s inside the fridge? But it also tells me what the temperature is here, too, and I keep this right there so I can monitor the temperature inside the wet bay at all times.
So, as a quick review, I insulated the doors, insulated the wet bay box, and used it up and through and behind her. I used the foam and foil tape on all the plumbing and then used a light. Since then, we’ve been in cold temperatures, and I never have to worry about this. Now, if it’s getting down into the frigid temps, low 20s, and teens, I will first not hook up my water. All the filters on the spigot come off, and they go into the bay. My hoses go in because I don’t want them to freeze, get complicated, and crack them, right?
You don’t hook up water when it gets that cold. You use fresh water in your tank, but we have never had a problem keeping our water tanks in. My water tanks and everything are all up here. My black tanks, my water tanks—they’re all up here. You don’t have to worry about that plumbing or those tanks freezing. It’s plenty warm.
Okay, so now we’re inside the coach. I want to show you one of the largest areas where cold draft would come in, and it’s right here at the front door. Right here. Many diesel pushers have their house batteries in the back of another bay, but most gas coaches have their batteries underneath the steps. Okay? And that area where your batteries are is open right down to the ground, and I cannot tell you how much cold air will come in at night. I needed to fix this problem, so what I did was I knew I had to block this whole area.
Once again, I went dumpster diving and got a piece of thick cardboard. Once I had that template of how that cardboard would fit tight against the door, I took two pieces of that blue board, taped them together here, and made a flat piece. Okay? Then I took another piece of just one piece of the blue board, and this piece fits inside here. Do you see that? So this lip right here is where it rests outside here, and then this inner part snaps in here. And we push it in like that. So at nighttime, when we get ready to go to bed and it’s cold, that board goes on just like that. It lifts out easily for an emergency and snaps in quickly when we’re done with it or for the day or what have you. I pull it out and slide it right down behind the loveseat. I do not keep this in the bays.
This one little thing, right here on the inside of the coach, popping in at nighttime, will get rid of much cold air.
Doors right here, and the heat would pour out, and of course, the air conditioners have to work harder and all that nonsense. Well, guess what? It does the same thing in the winter—lots of cold air in that area. I will show you what I did in the center storage bin, but I’ve done it to all three. To demonstrate to you for this video, I went ahead and emptied everything here. What I did, these panels right here, they come out. Screws, hold them. When you drop this panel, look at this whole area and how far back this goes. Can you see that? It goes way back there, and it’s all empty. The only thing that’s back there is maybe a few wires. But this whole cavity was empty. I took off this one and this one, and you can see even up in there. Can you see all that insulation up there? I packed this entire area with that, and this, again, has made an enormous difference. You just put that in there, put the panels back up, screw it back up, do that on all three of these storage bays, and that whole front cap now is insulated for heat and for the winter.
So right below these storage bays, if you go right down here on the floor, you’ll see that we have these heater vents. See that? And underneath those heaters, there’s a little storage compartment. There’s nothing—there are no vents underneath there. It’s just a void area to store stuff. But that’s another place where a draft will come through. It comes right through the firewall from the engine bay, so Jack will roll up a towel, take this and tuck that towel in there, and block that draft that comes through there.
Now, over here on the driver’s side, where the other side of the firewall is, I tried to devise a way to block that area, but you know what? As it turned out, there’s a little draft there. There are many electronics in there, and maybe the wall is thicker, or I have no idea, but it’s not cold over here.
Okay, so here we are in the kitchen sink area. And below the kitchen sink, of course, you have your two cabinets. And when we first got this coach, we realized we opened up these doors, and I mean, in the summertime, the heat would pour out of these cabinets, and again, it’s just making our air conditioner work hard and all that. And then, in our first winter, we felt this cold—this was drafty in there. And I’m like, okay, we got to do something about that. Right behind the kitchen sink is where we have our outside TV, so you have just that little thin door that closes over the TV, and there was—and of course, you’ve got much plumbing back there. You have a lot of wiring harnesses and plumbing to feed the water up here, as well as your drain hoses and all that. And I’m like, we need to do something about this.
So let me show you what we did. Under the sink, I took this board off right here. I’m not going to—I don’t need to show you that, but I had utterly exposed everything behind here, and I retook this, took the paper backing off, and put through here, all up underneath the sink and down into here. I also went around all of the plumbing in there because, like I said, there are several lines. If you were to take this floor right out here in your coach, man, there is a bunch of stuff underneath here, so I insulated all that to keep the heat and the cold draft out in the winter.
Now, if you continue to the right over here, I pulled all these drawers out. Okay? And I removed them by these little latches. If you don’t need to learn how this works, one of these little latches is on either side of the drawer. You simultaneously lift on one side and push down on the other, and these drawers will come out. Once I removed all these drawers, I removed that insulation, reached in, and completely insulated the back wall up to the stove. So, this whole back wall here is insulated.
Another thing we do is have three vents. We have one over the kitchen, one in the half bath, and one in the full bath. So you take these vent pillows with insulation foil on one side and a pillow on the other and push them up. I’m going to go back to these pillows in a minute.
Okay, here we are in my favorite room, the coach’s bedroom. And I’m sure your bed lifts are just like this, just like ours, right? But let me show you what I learned when I got our coach ready to go full-time. If you pull the mattress out, you have this plywood bed area where the hinge is. Do you see that? That’s where it lifts up and down. But the first few weeks when we were sleeping in here, man, it was so cold up against the wall right here, and I was like, man, where is all that cold draft coming from? So I took this floor off, and you know what’s underneath there? Nothing—just some electrical lines, a couple of plumbing lines, and that was it. This area, about three feet wide and about six or seven feet long, was an empty cavity. And I’m like, well, no wonder! But that area was so deep that I could quickly put it in two layers. I also took the paper off, and this here draft is gone.
Okay, so we’ve talked about insulating and all that type of thing. Now, let me explain how we stay warm. We use two types of heaters, and they’re both ceramic. The first one we use is this floor model. We’ve had this floor model for a long time. We even had this at the house. They don’t make this anymore, but I have a good suggestion. One, it’s not only better than this one, but it’s cheaper and lighter. This one here is pretty beefy. It’s heavy, but it works great. Now, what we do is we have a 35-foot coach, and we put this in the living room, plug it in, and set it at 70. If it gets down to, say, 40, 42, 45, and we’re in a park, and we have electric, we turn this on, set it at 70, and this will keep the whole coach nice and toasty. If it gets lower than that, if it gets into the 20s, you know, the low 30s or the high 20s or whatever, we will use another smaller ceramic one in the bedroom, which I’ll show you in a minute. Now, some of you will have a—especially on the newer coaches you may have a fireplace in the living area. I’ve talked to many of our friends who have those, and that works well in the living area but not so much in the back of the bedroom. They usually have to put an additional smaller heater back there now, but I’ve got some other suggestions, too, and I’ll show you what we do. But using a floor heater like this and the one I will suggest to you, they’re pet safe. You don’t have to worry about pets rubbing up against here. If they fall over, they’re going to go off automatically. They’ll oscillate; you can adjust.
The temperature can be set to whatever you want—72, 74, 78, or 68, it doesn’t matter. And this right here, I mean, if you’re in a campground and you’re already paying for electricity or you have electricity, I don’t see any reason why you wouldn’t use an electric floor heater if you have full hookups. This is the way to go. Using a floor furnace is much cheaper than propane; we store ours underneath the table. It’s easy to store, set up, and adjustable, keeping the coach nice and toasty.
Now, let’s return to the bedroom, and I’ll show you what we do when it gets cold. We use this secondary heater. You can see it’s not very big, and it’s not very heavy. I put additional little stick pads on the bottom so when we put it on the counter, it won’t scratch the counter. We plug that baby in there, like that. It has a fan that’ll blow regular air; then it has heater settings—one for regular heat and two for more accelerated and a bit hotter. We just put it on those settings up there like that, and usually, we’ll set it on one. It’s hushed.
This ceramic heater doesn’t cost much, but we don’t have pets, and this one does not have a tip-over feature. Jack and I don’t care; we plug it in and set it, and it’s all good. But if you have cats or anything else that might jump up here and walk around, and that thing tips over, it will not go off. So, when using something like this in the bedroom or the living room, you want a tip-over automatic shut-off feature. But for us, this one works just fine. I will suggest the heater, which I recommend in the links below. It’s a great floor model, better than ours—lighter, cheaper, and much easier to source.
I want to talk to you about another option some people use here. It’s a propane-type heater. When you turn on your propane stove in the motorhome, right? You turn it on, click it, and the flames appear on your burner. You’re burning propane there, and your coach needs to be vented. That’s why they tell you not to use your stove to heat your house; it puts out toxic gases. If you’re using that kind of heater, you must be aware of that, too. You must have some windows or a couple of vents cracked open to use that type of heater because of the fumes and everything you get from a propane heater.
They have small propane bottles that you screw into the heater itself. Those who have followed me know I’m not a big fan of that stuff. It’s just more stuff to buy, more to take up room, and more weight. But if you are boondocking somewhere and don’t have full hookups to use an electric heater, then a propane heater is an excellent way to go. But we would use something other than our standard go-to heater.
Okay, It has a tip-over feature and all that type of stuff, too, but I recommend that if you don’t have full hookups or if you’re boondocking overnight at a Walmart, a Cracker Barrel, or something like that. This brings me to using your propane furnace in parks. We have often been in an entire hookup park, and it gets cold at night, and we hear our neighbors fire up their propane furnaces. Why are they using their propane furnace? You’ve got full hookups; why not just plug in a floor furnace? Propane is much more expensive than electricity; most campgrounds provide electricity anyway. Even if you have to pay for the electricity in addition to your camping fees, using an electric floor furnace like what we’re showing you is much more economical.
But getting back to the propane furnace, I may need to include something. Let me know in the comments if you use a propane furnace in an entire hookup park instead of a floor electric furnace. I’d love to hear your argument on why you use it and why it would be better. That would be good knowledge to know.
Another thing to keep your coach nice and toasty is that we have done it from time to time, again when it’s freezing, and I’m talking down into the 20s or the teens, right? We have used a heated mattress pad. A heated mattress pad goes under the fitted sheet around the mattress. Turn on the mattress pad about 30 minutes before you get ready, and it’ll make the bed nice and toasty. So when you slip into those covers, you can start spooning right away. This particular heated mattress pad is dual-controlled. The one I will link is awesome because it has extended six-foot controllers where you can tuck it away and have one for each side. That way, you can control each side if the wife likes it warmer and the husband likes it more. That’s another way to get the bedroom ready and keep it toasty before you go to bed.
Now, there’s one last thing I want to cover here, and this is important. We’ve talked about insulating and keeping warm and using heaters and all these types of things, but I’m going to tell you that when it’s cold outside, and you’ve got the coach inside lovely and toasty, condensation will form on the windows. And I will show you how to deal with that right now.
To deal with condensation, if you keep the coach warm and it’s cold outside, you’ll see water running down the windows. And especially in our coach, we’ve found that the cabin windows and the windshield do the most condensation. So here’s how we deal with this, and it works great. Up front, we have two of these dehumidifiers. It has a little tub back here. You can see we still have some water from the other night in there, but you can pull these out, dump it, put it back in, and it works off an electrical plug right here. It has an on/off feature. We put one in each corner of the windshield, and the way you hook it up is it has this little plug right here. You plug it in, and we run both to the dashboard’s center. I run an extension cord up to there from the side of the passenger chair and plug them both in.
Once I turn these on, I pull the curtains around like this. If you have a shade, put the shade down. And I make a little covering here. Why am I doing that? I’m doing that to prevent it because, again, what’s causing condensation is heat on the inside and cold on the outside. That creates condensation. So, by bringing both curtains around and keeping this area enclosed, I’m keeping the heat on the couch and away from the glass, preventing condensation. But what we also do is, you can see right here, we take two big towels. This is only done in the winter. We roll them up and push them back in here, so if condensation does drip down here, it’ll go into the towels. I do not want that water to run down behind the dash and get into all of my electronics back there, underneath the dash.
So we’ll put two towels there, two dehumidifiers here, and enclose the front area with our curtains. That takes care of the front area. Again, if it gets freezing and we’ve got heat blowing through here, we’ll put another one of those dehumidifiers in the back bathroom. So now I want to get back to the van. When you’re keeping the coach warm and cold outside, you don’t want to button up your coach. The coach needs to breathe. You can do one of two things: those pillows that I showed you go up into the vents, and you can pop those pillows out in a couple of those vents and take the vent and crack it, about that much. One vent is in the front, and one is in the back. Or you can take a window now and crack it.
Now, I’m not a big fan of the window thing because usually, when it’s cold and windy, that wind will whistle through the size of those windows, but if you crack a vent, you don’t get the whistling, you don’t get the wind blowing through, but you do allow the coach to breathe. Okay, so you can have the heaters going, you can have these dehumidifiers going, but make sure you have at least a couple of vents, and maybe even a little bathroom window cracked just a little bit to allow fresh air to come into the coach and will enable it to breathe.
I’ve explained everything here—the heaters, the pillows, the dehumidifiers, all the stuff we’ve discussed. I can’t believe I got that done, but I hope it helps you guys and makes it much more manageable. You go to one place, and it will all be there.