Welcome to the RV Shenanigans Podcast from Miller sin Motion!
To learn more about the Show please visit www.millersinmotion.com
Ever dreamt of embarking on an RV adventure in the heart of winter? Brace yourselves, RV enthusiasts, as we take you on a journey to explore the exhilarating world of cold weather camping, uncovering the nagging challenges and revealing our proven strategies to help you stay warm and cozy. We promise, by the end of this episode, you’ll be well-equipped to camp in colder temperatures, with a wealth of tips from choosing the right RV park to maintaining your heating systems, and the lesser-known propane levels management.
Picture our experiences wintering in a fifth wheel, battling freezing temperatures and frozen water hoses. Discover the difference insulation and heating capabilities can make, as we compare our previous fifth wheel RV to our current toy hauler RV. You’ll learn all about the importance of a suitable RV park, understand the ins and outs of managing your RV heating systems, and even find out how to keep your bedroom warmer than your living area.
But wait, there’s more! Immerse yourself in our conversation about proper RV maintenance for cold weather, where we reveal our personal strategies from insulating your RV to protecting your water lines and tanks from freezing. We’ll also discuss how understanding your propane levels can help you maintain toe-curling warmth during your frosty camping adventure. Be sure to check out our fun and informative YouTube video on the same topic, and don’t forget to share your own cold weather camping tips! Stay warm, RVers!
Welcome to the RV Shenanigans Podcast from Miller sin Motion!
To learn more about the Show please visit www.millersinmotion.com
Ever dreamt of embarking on an RV adventure in the heart of winter? Brace yourselves, RV enthusiasts, as we take you on a journey to explore the exhilarating world of cold weather camping, uncovering the nagging challenges and revealing our proven strategies to help you stay warm and cozy. We promise, by the end of this episode, you’ll be well-equipped to camp in colder temperatures, with a wealth of tips from choosing the right RV park to maintaining your heating systems, and the lesser-known propane levels management.
Picture our experiences wintering in a fifth wheel, battling freezing temperatures and frozen water hoses. Discover the difference insulation and heating capabilities can make, as we compare our previous fifth wheel RV to our current toy hauler RV. You’ll learn all about the importance of a suitable RV park, understand the ins and outs of managing your RV heating systems, and even find out how to keep your bedroom warmer than your living area.
But wait, there’s more! Immerse yourself in our conversation about proper RV maintenance for cold weather, where we reveal our personal strategies from insulating your RV to protecting your water lines and tanks from freezing. We’ll also discuss how understanding your propane levels can help you maintain toe-curling warmth during your frosty camping adventure. Be sure to check out our fun and informative YouTube video on the same topic, and don’t forget to share your own cold weather camping tips! Stay warm, RVers!
Welcome to the RV shenanigans podcast. I'm Ryan.
Speaker 2:I'm Lauren, and together we're Miller's Emotion. We are a husband and wife from Texas enjoying a new season of life since we sold our ranch in our Alliance Valor.
Speaker 1:And we are coming to you this week from Fort Worth, texas. We're back for the holidays. This is our home state. We both grew up in this area. For the most part, this area, north Texas, close enough, pretty much. Also, we're in our dinette because it's raining outside. Typically, we like to bring you a nice, pretty view but this is as good as you're going to get this week which is a side of someone else's RV and a tree.
Speaker 2:The electronics. They don't like rain.
Speaker 1:Yeah, neither does run. So we have a fun show for you today. With the temperatures changing, we wanted to talk a little bit about cold weather camping. We've been in a fifth wheel not this fifth wheel through the winter season and we kind of have it down to a science. Now we're relearning all of that stuff in our new RV, because every RV heats and cools a little differently.
Speaker 2:That's right, and if you know me, you know that this topic is very near and dear to my heart, because there are two seasons summer and I'm cold which, in all fairness, I'm cold is like 90, 95% of that time.
Speaker 1:It could be 105 degrees outside. She'd be cold somehow.
Speaker 2:It's about 80 degrees 85, but yeah, close enough Okay.
Speaker 1:Real close to that. So all right, in fact, let's just dive right into our topic. This is where I normally come back and say something funny, but it's like cold weather camping again. There's really nothing funny about it. The one joke that you're going to hear if you go full time and talk cold weather camping is like why you know that your home rolls. I cannot tell you how tired of that joke I am. So if you see us, don't say that joke, pick a new one. I'm all four jokes, obviously. But a lot of people will say well, if your home rolls, chase 70 degrees, chase 70 degrees. Why are you in North Texas when it can be very pretty or awful in the winter? Or why would you not go to South Florida or Southern California, arizona, somewhere that has warmer temperatures? Well, it's not always an option for everybody.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:In fact, the park we're currently in is more of a full timer park and so these RVs don't move very much, and you know it can be as experienced a few years ago in North Texas you can drop down to single digits for upwards of a week. Sometimes that's not the norm. Typically you hover in that you know 40s or 50s through the winter, which is much more manageable, by the way, in an RV. But if you do have that scenario where you have to call with a camper, maybe you just like to. We enjoy skiing. That's one of the things that we've done previously before owning an RV and we want to go do that again, but in our RV crazy crazy.
Speaker 2:Yes, we are a little crazy, that's right.
Speaker 1:So kind of diving into it. What exactly classifies it as cold weather camping?
Speaker 2:below 85?.
Speaker 1:Okay, that classifies it for Lauren, but for me it's, honestly, whenever you have to really start contemplating turning on your furnace and you need heating elements or those types of things. You can't keep the temperature of the RV without a heating element above a certain temperature, and that temperature is different for every person. For me it's like mid to low 60s. For Lauren it's like mid to low 80s.
Speaker 2:Oh, and that'll be different from RV to RV as well.
Speaker 1:Correct. So what is exactly cold weather camping? That's it for me, essentially. It's just when you really have to start thinking about things. Now. Every RV is different, like Lauren just said, so we're going to make some comparisons to our old RV and our new RV in this episode, so we are going to have a more encompassing kind of breakdown of the differences we found. But, for reference, our first RV was a 2021, 2022, 2022, because we go through RVs quick a 2022, grand design, solitude, 390 RK, so a traditional fifth wheel and it had the two axles. Our new RV is a 2024, alliance, valor 44, the 44 v 14. Sorry, I messed that up.
Speaker 1:This is a triple axle toy hauler so it's a little bit different. So it is a fifth wheel but it has that toy hauler space for the rear 14 feet of the living space, which technically is not living space, but we treat it as that. So what are some of the biggest differences to you between our fifth wheel to deal with cold? Weather between our fifth wheel and our toy hauler now.
Speaker 2:So to me the toy hauler space is not as well insulated, which we knew getting into it. But it's also a door we can close and so it kind of where the furnaces and where the fireplace, all those things, we can actually keep more of that heat in the space where we spend more of the time.
Speaker 1:And the reason why the toy hauler space isn't as well insulated is because it's a different flooring mechanism back there. So when you, a lot of times when you go to any toy hauler not just ours you have typically have a little small, you know, one to three inch, depending on how built the floors are in the main living space drop, so you have to step down just a little bit. Well, the reason being is that they use a different type of floor in the toy hauler space because it has to be able to support more weight, because if you put, say, a toy back there, for instance, and so whereas the flooring in the main living space isn't designed for that, so they build a little bit more up and they put more insulation in those types of things.
Speaker 2:So another thing to remember in our fifth wheel both the front and the rear were elevated Right, and in this one the rear is not elevated.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the front and the front's going to be very similar to what we have here. You're going to have a little bit of pass through underneath your stairs, inside, and then it's just the front cap. Obviously when you get up to the actual bedroom, our old fifth wheel exactly the same thing Now our pass through was much larger so we had more space that was up above. But having a I'm going to call it the dampener all that storage underneath our kitchen did create a little bit more of an air gap, which helped us keep that back a little bit warmer, in my opinion.
Speaker 2:It did Well. So heat rises. So, while the fireplace, which puts off the heater like a space heater, I guess, fireplace if you're watching.
Speaker 1:If you're not watching this, I'm using air quotes we I jokingly called a full place because it's an electric heater, but it's got. It looks like. It kind of looks like a fireplace.
Speaker 2:They do a good job but either way. So those were kind of in the middle, at the bottom, and then the heat would rise to those other surfaces, right, but that's a good point is that both of the the rigs had three air conditioner units, one of which had the heating element on it, and they both had the fireplace.
Speaker 1:None of our ACs have ever had a heating element. Yeah Well, you know what I?
Speaker 2:mean no, I don't. We could put, we could use the thermostat and select heat on one of them.
Speaker 1:So she's talking about the furnace.
Speaker 2:This is this is Lauren speak.
Speaker 1:And now you know why. You see it when you come a role and honest, we're having a conversation. If I look befuddled, it's cause I'm trying to decipher.
Speaker 2:We speak different languages.
Speaker 1:I speak RV and she speaks medical, so sometimes in the middle we don't know where that is. So yeah, what she's talking about is if you have two different heating elements, that's tied into. Well, you know, let's just talk about heating elements. That's one of the topics we'll just get into.
Speaker 2:Let's do it. Let's hash this out.
Speaker 1:So the different types of heating elements. So I'm going to talk about external first. So that's going to be like your faux place, so your little electric fireplace, which is essentially just a small space heater. I say small that actually puts off quite a bit of heat.
Speaker 2:Yes, it does.
Speaker 1:Ours does, Our previous one did. We haven't seen one that hasn't yet. It's not enough to cool the whole RV if you're sub freezing but it's enough to the whole RV.
Speaker 2:We don't want to cool it in sub freezing or that.
Speaker 1:But I mean, there's people out there you never know. Told you, we speak different languages but it is enough to kind of take the chill out of the air and then you're going to have what a lot of people use. You'll have those kind of residential style ceramic space heaters, that kind of thing. I have seen some people use a propane powered heater inside. I'm not going to lie, that gives me the heebie jeebies.
Speaker 2:That just makes me plum scared. That's a place I'm not willing to go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's that one probably has the greatest fire risk out of any of them because there's no tip control. It is an actual heated element that's only protected by typically a great. Now again, I'm speaking to the generic version of this. There may be some out there that have those elements, so please don't come at me.
Speaker 2:It's not for us. Let's just leave it at that.
Speaker 1:And there's a general rule of thumb it's it's the most dangerous. Now, obviously, you're going to have things like what we use in the barn and that kind of stuff which is like those jet heaters. Those are actually the most dangerous. Please don't go get one of those things like anything meant for outdoor only and you bringing inside your RV.
Speaker 2:That's just please don't do that, can we hope that goes without saying?
Speaker 1:you'd think so. Now we move into kind of some of the things that can be internally installed that stay on your rig 24 seven. I know the full place is technically there, but because it's got that heating element it's a lot like having an external heater. You're going to have one, maybe two other whole house unit type things and that are going to be tied into your actual thermostat. One of them is going to be your furnace. Almost every RV comes with this. I have yet to see one that doesn't.
Speaker 1:That is a propane powered, typically a propane powered furnace. It runs and then when you, when you put your thermostat to heat, that's typically what it means. Now, if you have a thermostat that when it says heat, it says electric or gas, the furnace is the gas. Electric is going to be essentially a heating element or a heat strip that's actually built into your AC. So what happens is your air conditioner has a fan on it in a compressor. So if the compressor kicks on, it's not just pulling air and rotating, it's actually cooling it. If the compressor is off and you just turn the fan on, all it's doing is forcing air from inside the RV back to the circulation system and then back down. So if you have a heating element and it can utilize that fan and heat the air a little bit, using that element to push it back down, it's like having a really fancy above you portable heater.
Speaker 2:Thank you for that lesson in heat. We appreciate it.
Speaker 1:OK. So that's kind of one way to know what you have if you're unsure. That's why, typically, when you only see heat on one of your thermostats again, we have three one in the toilet space, one in the bedroom, one here in the main living dining room it only says heat, that means it's the furnace. If it says electric or gas, when you cycle through you have both. So where do you really use these types of things Like, what's the line? When do you really start to kick on furnaces, heaters, all that stuff?
Speaker 2:So we usually use the fireplace type heater whenever it's just a little cool, basically to keep the rig above like 60, 62 degrees at night, maybe a little warmer if we're here during the day, and then we really kick on. The thermostat heater is what I'm going to call it Furnace Whenever it is colder than that the fireplace can't keep up or we want to heat that underside where the pipes are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, and we're going to get into that in a second. So but for now we're just going to talk about maintaining the temperature that you want to maintain in the RV for your comfort or your pets comfort or whoever's in the RV. That's living is comfort. So, like she said, we have a tendency to use the electric fireplace as our first. That's the thing we turn on first and we see how it goes. Now, if it's going to be a little cooler that night, like, let's say, it's 50 degrees outside Well, inside the RV, I mean, it might be down in the mid sixties at that point. The fireplace works great for that because it just kind of cycles the heat on it. Like I always like to say, it takes the nip out of the air.
Speaker 2:It does Well. Also, our little fireplace has a thermostat on it. I'm sure all of them do, but I think that ours works pretty well, and so we can actually set that pretty low, so that it's not just making the place an oven.
Speaker 1:Right, and we do that sometimes overnight too, because and we'll talk about why when we get into the pipe section, this whole thing or the water component. But as far as the furnace goes, the one thing about RV furnaces is it's feast or famine. I feel like.
Speaker 2:True, I agree with you.
Speaker 1:We're either in a rotisserie and I'm starting to smell like bacon because I'm here, or it's not on it.
Speaker 2:It's cold, so that's where my heating blanket comes in for her.
Speaker 1:Yes and so. But you and that's but that's important to know you do have to think outside the box when you're thinking about your own comfort and sometimes you know, wearing pajama pants or long sleeve stuff to bed or like like, well, what are the sheets that are fuzzier, flannel, like flannel sheets, you know thicker blankets, that kind of thing Come in super handy. Now, if you do get in that scenario where you're going to drop below freezing, that starts to kind of change some things, because now you have the scenario that, well, if we drop below freezing, what's my basement going to be at? Where am I exposed pipes, that kind of thing. And so when you start talking about actual safety systems on board like you don't want your pipes to freeze, obviously- Obviously.
Speaker 1:Most of the time it's pecs or the knockoff version of pecs, depending on your rig. Well, that's flexible tubing. Some of it it can withstand, but let's be honest, it's plastic, it's actually going to freeze pretty quick.
Speaker 1:Plastic? Yeah, there's. No, it's not a house, obviously. So you do have to remember if you're in, this is very situational. Based on your RV. I know our solitude and our valor. Both are ducted heat to the basement. So what that means is when we turn the furnace on, the furnace will actually force some heat down to the basement. Well, that goes where our water block manifold is on our rig, or our Nautilus panel on our previous rig. Again, wherever your water sewer, all that stuff kind of comes to one place your water pump typically is not far from there.
Speaker 1:Those areas you really want to make sure you keep above freezing, I would argue you want to keep them closer to like 38 to 40 degrees at the minimum. Don't even flover. The line is what I'm trying to say. So in doing that, one of the biggest tips we have is one we use what's called a Gove temperature and humidity sensor. We have those placed very strategically throughout the rig and our valor. We had it right with our our water manifold system or our Nautilus, and then we also had one in our rear storage, because we did have some pipes down there as well, and then we put them with our lithium batteries. We don't have our batteries yet, so we don't have that sensor back up. And then we always have one just on the exterior of the coach to kind of tell us what's going on, if nobody touched anything, just outside temperature, and then one inside just to kind of know where our living room space is at.
Speaker 2:Essentially, oh, it's also important for the dogs to not just us if we're away from the rig.
Speaker 1:And just before I move on, that temperature sensor and all that that kind of tells you what's going on. You can actually find those on our Amazon homepage. If you just go to the website RVShenaniganscom or MillersandMotioncom click shop. There's the Amazon link right there and you can see all the stuff we're talking about if you so need to find those things and legitimately that's something that we rely heavily on and we have for a long time.
Speaker 2:So it's it's tried and true in our opinion. Yeah, we like it.
Speaker 1:And it's not so ridiculously expensive. Now, it only connects if you have a decent internet system. But I think that those two things, especially if you're full-timing, are fairly important. And so when we get into that kind of thing like you, want to really make sure that you set your low temperature warnings and that's something that I always did. So if you're passed out of sleep because it always seems to be cold as that, like three to five am, which is when typically it is, and it's happened a few times where the sensor's gone off and it wakes me up and I just like I have it set to 40 degrees, so I know, so I have a chance to correct it before we get too low, and so when that happens, I just make sure and come turn the furnace on.
Speaker 1:It may actually make it warmer than I want to be, inside the rig, but at some point you have to just kind of be okay with that because it's about preserving your pipes. I have seen some people put like little portable space heaters, ceramic heaters, in the underbelly. How do you feel about that?
Speaker 2:Danger. I feel like there's a lot of danger with that. Now I'm I'm also very conservative and somewhat scared of catching our house on fire, so yeah, I go back and forth.
Speaker 1:I think it just depends on the scenario, because we had in our, where our lithium batteries were in our last coach, it was the very front Well, that's an uninsulated portion of it of the rig, and so to keep our lithium batteries above temperature. If you don't know, lithium doesn't like cold weather. It doesn't. It doesn't necessarily hurt the batteries, but it doesn't like to charge or discharge anymore, so they can shut down. What I did was I had I found a small space here that I could actually plug into an outlet we had in there and it actually kept it elevated. Now the downside is the heat all stayed up, but it would keep us just above freezing if it stayed on and it had a temperature sensor, so if it ever got above a certain temperature it would shut itself off.
Speaker 2:That's what I liked about that one, so it wasn't just on.
Speaker 1:And again that is listed on our Amazon page because we'd set that all up before you got out of this, out of the solitude, into the valor. So it's handy, it's nice and small. I would probably say if you have a toy haul, you're probably going to want a secondary heater out there.
Speaker 2:I do agree with you.
Speaker 1:We haven't bought one yet, but we're just now starting to experience cold temperatures, like not just it's a little cool, it's fine, but where you get up and it's like you're good up in the bedroom and you, as you get closer to the back of the rig, it's like, oh, we're cooling off, we're cooling off. Then you go out there and like, okay, it's actually cold and kind of miserable out here.
Speaker 2:But a lot of those not only come with thermostats but they also come with safety things, so like if they tip over they turn off, and different things like that.
Speaker 1:Right. So when you're, when you get back into some of your pipes and your pecs and all that stuff, you really have to kind of just make sure that when you're operating all your heating elements, that your furnace has to be able to come on to keep your underbelly above freezing. Now here's the dilemma with that your temperature sensor that turns your furnace off and on is inside your coach. So if you have, if you think to yourself, I'm going to save on propane because I'm on 50 amp service or 30 amp. If you have to be in that kind of a coach, I'm plugged in. I'm just going to go buy a bunch of little space heaters and I'm never going to use my furnace.
Speaker 1:It's great in theory and you're going to be comfortable hypothetically by the right heaters and compensate correctly, but you are not going to allow your thermostat to kick on to warm your underbelly. So it's something we actually. So our thermostat's not very far away from our fireplace and it is a bit of a problem. And of course, naturally we put our coffee pot right next to the fireplace too. So that's something else we have to pay attention to early in the morning when we get up and make coffee, because it's. It's still pretty cold some mornings, when we get up and the coffee pot will raise the temperature.
Speaker 1:I've seen it go up four or five degrees with the coffee pot going right there. So we do have to be very careful as far as how we use other heating elements so that we pay attention to what's going on down there. So typically on a day like or an evening that we're going to have to run the thermostat or the um, the heating element, the furnace, from the thermostat, we don't set anything else as high.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:So do you want to give them an example of a few evenings ago, kind of what we set our temperatures at typically? And I will say we, I like it golden, so I love winter. Meanwhile she has to go like three or four blankets, one of them heated burrito fight, and I'm sitting there just in one thin sheet.
Speaker 2:So what it was it? We set the thermostat to 64 and then the fireplace to 62. Was that what we did?
Speaker 1:I think it's reverse of that. Was it reverse?
Speaker 2:of that, can you tell? I'm not the one who does this. So, yes, but anyways, and so if we did that, if we switched them, then you have to make sure that the furnace comes on at some point. Basically.
Speaker 1:Right, and typically we don't. I mean, if it's going to be really cold that night, that thing might run all day or all night.
Speaker 1:Um, we have had that happen in our solitude. We have not been through enough cold weather in the valley to find out what it does. Um, I will tell you one of the downsides to wintering in a fifth wheel, to, there's not a ton of them, um, size obviously going to be one of them, but, um, because your bedroom is elevated above the cap, or well, above the bed of a truck. In that area, heat rises, so typically it's warmer higher up, and so that means the bedroom warms up first. So we don't have a temperature sensor in the bedroom. I'd be curious to stick one in there, not gonna lie.
Speaker 2:I mean, we have the thermostat.
Speaker 1:it tells us what it is we do and we do have the bedroom thermostat up there, but it does. The warmest part of our RV is our bedroom.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:The downside of that is the dogs don't necessarily sleep in there because it's an RV bedroom. It's not the biggest thing in the world, so typically they'll come out into the living room somewhere and it's always a little cooler out here. Plus, you have to kind of be careful. So like we are saying that we set our temperature in here at 62, the reality of it it were probably closer to like 64 to 66 up in the main bedroom and then with the burrito queen over here, it's perfectly fine.
Speaker 2:Well, the dogs also come with fur coats. I think they handle it a little bit better than I do.
Speaker 1:I don't come with fur coats well, I mean a little bit but I come with just internal layer, so I'm more like a whale Insulation Blubber. Okay, so we kind of talked about what we do and how we manage the heat, but in the reality of the whole thing, when you start talking about pecs and that lining, it can break so easy. So that's honestly my biggest fear. So also keeping water running, but your water has to come into the coach somehow, bingo. So we use for our water hoses just our normal everyday water hose. We use the zero G water hose.
Speaker 1:I don't know how to call it that we carry two at all times in case one breaks. One is a smaller 20 foot hose and then we have a longer 50 foot hose, because we've been in scenarios where we need all of it, thanks horse shows. So the problem with that is if it's gonna freeze outside and you're on city water and that line freezes, well, multiple things happen you break your hose, you've lost your water supply, all those types of things. Now, one solution that we don't do is you can go buy a heated hose.
Speaker 2:And there are plenty of people that love this option. Sure, but that hasn't been useful enough for us.
Speaker 1:So what the heated hose is. It is exactly what it sounds like it's a hose. It's a water hose Camco makes one. There's a handful of brands that make them out there but then it's got this like insulation layer on the outside of it and then it's got a heating coil wrapped around it. That heating coil then goes all the way back to, like, let's say, where your spigot is. There is a section of the coil that sticks out and what you do is when you connect it, you wrap that around the spigot and then you have to plug that in somewhere. Typically, your spigot's gonna be near your pedestal and so when you do have that scenario typically you're gonna have if you have a 50 amp service or a 30 amp service you're always gonna have a 110 on there somewhere. So you would just utilize that, make sure the breaker's on and then run that into your coach. That would keep your water hose from freezing.
Speaker 2:Doesn't keep the spigot from freezing.
Speaker 1:It helps, it does actually help. It helps, but it's not 100% no, and it depends on your spigot Like at the park run right now the spigot's underground and like a valve kit Right. But I've seen plenty where the water line comes out of the ground by like a foot or three.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then comes up and over. It's not gonna help with that.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:And parks. If it gets cold enough, they may shut water off. We had that happen at a park last winter where they decided because it was gonna stay so cold for so long that they were shutting water off. Now they warned everybody, but the amount of people that didn't understand they had a freshwater tank was terrifying.
Speaker 2:That's true.
Speaker 1:Because there are people that don't use that freshwater tank ever.
Speaker 2:So yes, that's what we do.
Speaker 1:So that, and that's exactly what we do. It doesn't matter. Those hoses are expensive. Last I'd checked they're about $230 for a 15 footer Oof and so obviously longer, more expensive. I didn't look past that because when I saw the 15 foot price, so I went dry, heaved a little, cried and then said what's the second solution? So that second solution is if your camper is equipped with this and any camper that's before season typically has what's called tank heaters You're gonna have one on your black and gray tanks and you're gonna have one on your freshwater tank. This isn't gonna warm your water by any means, it's just gonna keep your water above freezing, so it's not gonna allow your tanks to freeze. Plus, your tanks are above the insulation line. Again, if your coach is rated Now I'm speaking on behalf of a solitude and a valor If you have some other product that I don't know that much about, there is a chance you don't have this. So just understand your RV and say that we're speaking to if it is insulated and has a tank heater.
Speaker 2:These are all options. In other words Pretty much.
Speaker 1:So what we do is, if we know that the water's gonna be down or we're gonna be sub-freezing for, let's say, 48 hours, well, the good news about us having the lithium batteries previously is that we would boondock and we knew how long we can make or how many gallons we would need for 48 hours in boondocking mode or in full life mode, and so we just make a decision how many gallons do we need?
Speaker 1:Just like if we were gonna go boondocking and we literally, before it drops below freezing, we fill the tank. Now, if it's gonna be at like 32 degrees for a few hours, I'm still gonna fill the tank and I'll probably cut it off, but I'm just gonna drain the line and then I'm probably not gonna take the hose in and all that stuff. If we're gonna be 15 degrees for a few days, I'm actually gonna coil the hose up, put everything away and bring it inside and I say inside in its storage place, in the pass-through, so that it is cannot freeze, because if it freezes, that means my pipes are also freezing, which is two problem. So have you noticed when we do that, is there any significant changes? Besides, you have to be a little more aware.
Speaker 2:Not at all, nope, and that's the goal right.
Speaker 1:Right and best part is it's free, very cabled. If you have tank eaters and above the insulation line, it's free.
Speaker 2:And then it takes that whole question mark away, Right?
Speaker 1:completely. So there is one other thing we should probably talk about that's outside, oh, boy. That can freeze. That I've put off because it is probably the grossest thing to talk about.
Speaker 2:What are you talking about? The poop tube Poopsicles?
Speaker 1:You like poopsicles, didn't you? So yes, your sewer hose is also outside. Now I know a lot of full timers in this park. They just leave not their black tank. I think most people know not to leave your black tank open.
Speaker 2:And if you don't, there's your hint.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but some people will leave their gray tank open. We do sometimes, especially when we're doing laundry, but we'll put a P-trap in our sewer line so that it keeps smells out. So I don't love doing it and I don't do it with our kitchen because food particles do go down the galley tank. I don't ever wanna do that because, just like in the black tank, things can get stuck to the side. It's just less gross when it's like a leftover green bean versus Poopsies.
Speaker 2:Leftover green beans yeah processed leftover green beans.
Speaker 1:Didn't take long for us to get to potty talk. So we always leave our gray tanks closed, except for our rear. This is gonna sound bad our rear black tank.
Speaker 2:But Explain yourself.
Speaker 1:In a toy hauler. In our toy hauler, specifically, are the things that go into the rear black tank are the sewer, the sink, so the toilet in the back, the sink and the washer dryer. Now, that being said, we've never used that toilet as an actual toilet.
Speaker 2:So while it says black tank, there's nothing black in it.
Speaker 1:At the moment it's gray, and so if we had someone stay with us and they were gonna use it, I would treat it as such, I would put water in it, I would treat the tank, I would do all those things. Until that day comes, I am not gonna worry about it. It's our washer tank and even then I'll still flush it out and then I will kind of slowly convert it back into a gray tank through cleaning processes and those types of things. So, yeah, you wanna make sure and close them all. So if you're obviously going to have a long period of time that you're sub-freezing temperatures, make sure and do a good, nice, thorough dump, as the Hanks like to say. Let her rip aggressively, so, but seriously, and then reset everything and then close all your valves If it's gonna be very cold. I would actually tell you again kind of the same thing if you're gonna pull the hose in, maybe consider pulling in the sewer hoses too, and I only say that because typically they're just plastic.
Speaker 2:Maybe we pull them to a different bin. Don't pull them together, bad idea.
Speaker 1:Like you're in transit. Essentially is just get to travel day status.
Speaker 2:Just seeing if you're awake.
Speaker 1:And so. But because those are just plastic, when it gets super cold outside those can get really, really brittle. I know I'm guilty of trying to hook stuff back up and I didn't pull it in. I got brittle and I took one step too far and didn't realize I had stepped on it and it crushed it completely. Now it was empty, none of the tanks were open. No harm, no foul, except for I had to buy a new sewer hose. But it's super important that you, either prepared for that or be, take the correct procedures or precautions to prevent those types of things from happening. That was a lot. Would you like to?
Speaker 1:throw in any nuggets for cold weather, except for the brand and where to find your heated blanket.
Speaker 2:No, that pretty much sums it up. My house shoes and my heated blanket, and you keep the rest of the coach nice and roasty toasty.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I do think it's important too that Lauren doesn't necessarily know the process for everything on the coach, but if I know that she knows enough about certain things, like how much to turn on and when to turn it on, so that everything's okay and what to look for, so that if I couldn't be here for some reason or if I had a work trip or something and it did get below freezing, I had confidence that she could do that. So it's always important for everybody in the RV to be on the same page.
Speaker 2:It's true.
Speaker 1:Now my last little cold weather hack.
Speaker 2:Oh boy.
Speaker 1:So we go all summer. We may change propane tanks once out every three to five months, because it's pretty much just what we use on our stove top. When you turn that furnace on, you're gonna burn some propane.
Speaker 2:Burn through it.
Speaker 1:So you've probably heard a bunch of other YouTubers and podcasters say this. We live by it. We only have one tank open at a time, always. Now there's some unpleasant evenings because of that, but I'd rather know that than not know that. So the reason why and we leave one tank open, we make sure that we have. So we have two 30 pound tanks on this coach and then we have an auto changeover valve and when that auto changeover valve kicks over, it can't find propane on the other side, so it starts shutting things off automatically, like the furnace and that kind of stuff. So typically the reason why we do that is so that I know, I always know where my propane levels are. So like right now well, just the other day actually we finally, after picking the coach up, just burn through the last of our propane on our off-camp side.
Speaker 2:So, for reference, we picked the coach up in August and that was November, so three months.
Speaker 1:This is.
Speaker 2:November. Well, when we ran out, you were talking about oh yeah sorry, I thought I caught you, like you got me earlier, try again.
Speaker 1:So when you run out of that propane and typically you know, because your stove flame starts to get a little smaller or you're cold, if you have your furnace on is now I know I need to go turn the other one on switch over. Now keep in mind, when you do that you may have to bleed the line a little bit, which is really simple, it's not complicated. Just come in, turn your stove on till it lights. Don't let me listen Don't constantly let propane run into your coach without it burning. That's bad for everybody. You're gonna set your O2 off, but just bleed the line by running your stove until it lights and then that flame comes back up to what you would normally see in like a high setting or low or whatever setting you have your stove on. That's bleeding the line and pulling it back through. That should allow your furnace to come back on.
Speaker 1:If your furnace doesn't come back on when you do that, sometimes you have to reset it. You just turn it off for a minute, turn it back on. That's typically it. If you have a bigger problem than you need to take or to learn how to reset it on the panel, that's actually in the furnace. So okay, from the propane side and then from there I would actually go ahead and remove that empty tank and set it out somewhere near the stairs or wherever, so that I knew I needed to get propane.
Speaker 1:And typically within a day or two of running out I'll go get propane, bring it back, put it back on the coach. But we don't open again. We hook it up. I go ahead and get a little propane line just to make sure the valves are all working, shout out to gas stop. We have gas stop on our, so if we ever did have a propane leak, you would automatically turn off but make sure all that's functioning and I would turn the propane tank back off and then continue to use the tank that I'm open on and then repeat that whole process. Now the downside to that is some evenings, when we're burning a lot of propane and we run out, the furnace kicks off and so all of a sudden it goes from whatever we have it set. So let's say we have it set at 65, 66. And now all of a sudden it's like I don't know 50, 45.
Speaker 2:It's not a fun way to wake up. We'll say that.
Speaker 1:It's not, but at the end of the day, I'd much rather know I need to switch than versus not, and so one solution to that and I have not tested these, I am very curious about them, though is there's a company called Mopeca. They make propane, take sensors. Our neighbor actually right there just put his on the other day, so I'm kind of letting him be the guinea pig at the moment, and I wanna see how they do over the next week or so, while we're still here. But what it is it's a radar based sensor, magnetizes to the bottom of your tank and it sends essentially like a sonar signal and it measures how much liquid from the top or from the fill line down, and it kind of tells you percentages.
Speaker 1:Now, it's not accurate accurate, but I think they said within about 5% it's accurate. So if you know you're going down and you're around 10% or something like that, just switch over, pull that tank out and just know it needs to be filled. It's just not empty. Also, one other thing about propane is, as it gets, cold propane, so it's called LP or liquid propane. So it is a liquid that's in that tank and then you have to have a little bit of room for it to turn into a gas, which is done when you open the valve and it processes through. If it is cold outside it, that gas, the liquid, actually shrinks a little bit.
Speaker 2:I'm so glad you're bringing this up. Why well, because not everybody knows that.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay, and it's actually really important. So that, like that gas sorry, that liquid can shrink, so does the gas, but the liquid mainly shrinks down. So you get less Pull like you get less gas coming off of the liquid right, it's less pressure up there onto that correct.
Speaker 1:Now in the summer, like when it's everything's warm, that stuff expands pretty close. But the importance of this is when someone is measuring. If you see someone filling a propane tank and they don't have it on a scale and they're not actually measuring, it's super important to understand what that could cause. We had it happen to us where a propane tank got overfilled. There wasn't enough room for the gas. We had to actually, in a very safe and responsible way, empty some LP out to create gas. Because it was that scenario where we were around zero to five degrees, we needed the propane and our other tank was getting low and we didn't have a whole lot of solutions because the guy at the store essentially did us a favor by giving us more, but doesn't understand.
Speaker 1:So just at the top of every propane tank, legally, they have to put how many pounds it can accept and so, and it tells you the weight of the tank empty. So that's what they use when they're filling a tank. They always put it on a scale and then they set the scale to whatever your tank is rated at, and then they just watch, and until it goes up to that point now some scales will auto shut off. Most of them are manually. They have to manually turn it off. I'm you'll learn what it is the first couple times you do it. Just ask them, especially if you have someone that's legitimately good at it. They'll do all these things and just ask them hey, out of curiosity, how, how many pounds did it take, and what is it rated for?
Speaker 1:and then you can reverse, do some math of what was left in the bottom and then you kind of know, like I know, in our 30 pounds it's about eight gallons and we'll get really confusing here, because when you know how many pounds you just got, you go into the store to pay and what are they charged by?
Speaker 2:yeah, the pound, not the gallon yes, so I always know what unit they're working in and this process. When that happened, that took a long, long time for us to figure out, to actually get it where it was working again, to figure out what the problem was, what the solution was, and to get there it did, and but at the same time too, now we have that knowledge base and we obviously want to be able to share that with the podcast listeners.
Speaker 1:You know we are also going to be doing a cold weather camping on the youtube video. It's going to be a little more Miller's in motion as so goofy. We take a fun approach on that kind of stuff. But that's why we wanted to do the podcast, so we can come into a little bit more detail and explain these things a little bit better. So Cold weather just avoid it or do what I was just talking about.
Speaker 2:Well, it depends on what you can do right, because if you can go to florida for the for the winter, you know Good dose to you, good job. But for those of us now we have a couple more tips to kind of write it out a little bit easier.
Speaker 1:So if you have questions about Realistically any cold water cold water, I like my water cold. If you have any questions about cold water, oh my gosh. If you have any questions about cold weather, camping and ryan's gonna learn how to speak today, please do us a favor. You know, jump over. If you're on youtube, you can leave the comments down. We'll be happy to answer anything that comes across that way. If you're on one of the podcast platforms, there's not really any way, but you can always shoot us an email at info at millers in motion dot com. Uh, and also, while you're there, you can check out the website.
Speaker 2:And maybe this goes without saying, but we have never been somewhere long enough or severe enough to require skirting. I feel like that's a whole different topic, and so just know we aren't talking to that today.
Speaker 1:No, we're not, and I will say that if you are planning to go like extreme cold weathers, I do think skirting something. So, just briefly, air flows underneath your coach. Cold air makes everything above it a little colder. So if you put air skirting, essentially you're preventing air to move as much as possible Between the outside and underneath your coach, which then it creates like a little bit of a bubble. By no means is it warm down there. You're just trying to keep it above freezing and that does actually do a pretty good job of keeping it above freezing. So that's an option and there's a bunch of companies out there and maybe one day we'll Talk about them, but we have no experience with skirting, so we're not going to speak to it.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:All right, we're going to take a quick break and we're going to come back and wrap up. Bear with us for one minute. All right, we are back. So there, it's Thanksgiving, so you guys are getting this. If you're listening to when this podcast comes out, it's coming out the tuesday before Thanksgiving. So we just wanted to take a quick second and say we are very thankful that you are here. Whether you found us through the youtube channel or if you're brand spanking new to us because you didn't. You want to understand cold weather camping a little bit more. We are very thankful that you found us and we are especially thankful for our family members. If you're on to where our family members are, our membership program. There's all different types of stuff that involve with that, but we're super thankful for all of them. What are you thankful for over there?
Speaker 2:I'm thankful for you.
Speaker 1:Okay, that was a cop out, but whatever, we have a lot coming up. We got the word last week that we're going to be doing live recordings of this podcast. So exciting but where Lauren?
Speaker 2:Like we've mentioned, it won't be from somewhere cold. It will be from florida. We're going to the florida rv super show in tampa in january.
Speaker 1:So if you're going to be at the florida rv super show or in the area, uh, come by. We're going to be at the alliance booth and we are going to have a whole setup. We're going to be doing live podcast recordings. We are going to be talking rvs, we're going to be talking about the travel lifestyle full time and we're going to have all kinds of fun guests. As we get closer We'll be announcing Times that we're doing those, as well as who some of our guests will going to be, as they confirm. But I can tell you I've been talking to said guest. We are very, very excited to have them on Um, and this podcast was always designed to have guests on. It wasn't just supposed to be us talking about everything under the sun.
Speaker 2:And if you have questions or things that you want hashed out through a podcast, maybe with some of those people, make sure to send us an email or drop a comment somewhere so we can know about that.
Speaker 1:Exactly. All right, that's gonna do it for us this week. Thank you so much for watching. Have a great Thanksgiving thursday, or I hope you had a great Thanksgiving if you're listening to this after that and uh, we can't wait to talk some Christmas stuff soon. Thank you again so much for listening and we will see you or talk to you Next week. Safe travels, everybody.