😰 INSULATE, HEAT & PROTECT • Key to stay warm in your RV

hey guys what is up okay so today i'm going to share with you guys on how joni and i stay warm in the winter in our rv these are some great tips that i've developed and i am very confident that you haven't seen most of these before so we're going to get into that right now details coming up on rv street [Music] okay let's get right to it i know i know you don't have to worry about staying warm in the winter because well like us a lot of you go down south for the winter but you know no matter where you are when you're traveling you're going to run into cold temperatures at times that you know it doesn't matter how well you plan or whatever you just can't fool mother nature sometimes so the things that i've developed and made for our coach to keep us warm you're just going to love some of these ideas so the first thing we need to do is go to home depot so let's go okay so here we are at home depot and the first place we're going to go to is in the plumbing department and you can see right here this is where they carry the plumbing foam covering to insulate pipe okay this is what you'd normally use in a house or whatever i'm going to go ahead and get half inch some half inch pieces and i'm going to get some three-quarter inch pieces and depending on the coach that you have you may want to go with one inch also while you're right here getting this foam insulation tubes make sure you get a couple of rolls of foil tape because you're going to need that too okay so now we're still in home depot and we went over into the building supplies and 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 a dull side and a foil reflective side you can put either side facing the air space but if you want a little bit more insulation put the reflective side towards the outside towards the air space okay right down from where we saw the insulation board you're going to see these rolls of r19 and it says faced what faced means is it has paper backing we're going to go ahead and buy one roll of r19 faced but we're going to end up removing this paper backing to use it in the coach now a little bit further down from the insulation boards and the r19 fiberglass insulation we also have this reflective material some people call it reflectix but you can see it's a very thin type of material i'm not a big fan of this but i know a lot of you or a lot of other rvers do use this they'll put it in their windshield or on the side of their windows or whatever i don't like personally living in a cave but if you want to use it you can get that in the installation area at home depot also so we just got back from home depot and i bought three of those foam insulation boards several tubes of that plumbing insulation and two rolls of the foil tape now the projects that i'm going to show you i've already done these i did these four years ago and we have been implementing these projects and these diy upgrades to help us keep warm years ago okay but we're going to go back to each section i'm going to 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 big 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 and especially when it's windy that wind will whistle through these slide seals and you'll get a big draft up underneath inside the coach i mean you can literally sometimes feel the wind go in there so the first thing i did is i took these foam pieces and i i take them and i tuck them up inside that slide and i do that all the way down so when we arrive somewhere it is automatic what i do whether it's warm in the summer or cold in the winter i 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 coming in there and it keeps dirt from accumulating up in here now the second thing i did is i made these insulation boards right here now when you open up the slides you can see that this is a whole big open area here and we have a rack and pinion uh slide system you can see that right up underneath here so in the summer time people driving up and down dusty roads and all that type of stuff dust gets all inside this area into my mechanisms for my p rack and pinion so in addition to that in the winter time you get a lot of draft and wind that blows up inside here and that makes 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 just take them and i just pop that in there and then i make a separate piece and that goes in the bottom so now this whole area cannot get dust in it 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 i 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 on the little slide on the passenger side and you can see i've done the same thing here okay yes it has seals but this gives a little bit added protection and then when we get ready to go i just pull these out and slip them into the bay okay so here we are at the wet bay and this is always a concern to people about how to keep their water from freezing and all that type of thing we do not have heated bays and you know how fussy i am about water right i mean i got it triple filtered and softened and i don't want to have any uh freezing issues either so what i did with that with that board is i insulated every single bay door that's the first thing i did now i could have used a little bit of adhesive on the door and then press it in there but 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 uh the the new owner may not want this in here and he'll peel it off and then you're gonna have all those splotches there of uh adhesive so i was just very careful to cut this very tight and so it snaps up in there and it stays put now i actually did some tests before and after i put these boards in i used my infrared thermometer tester and inside the base was 43 degrees after i put in this board before the board it was in the 20s so this really really helped insulate and keep the inside underneath the 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 our wet bay is a plastic tub of sorts it's all plastic down here on the bottom up on the sides and it goes all the way back up in there but this plastic here i mean even though it's thick when it gets cold you know this stuff can really magnify the the cold so what i did is i insulated the whole outside of this tub i used the insulation board and i did on the outside of the of this tub i put adhesive i put the blue board up there i made it i kind of boxed it all in up underneath so after i had it cut out adhered to the bottom taped it and put the bolts then i bought some 3m rubberized material three cans and i went underneath laid on my back and i totally rubberized that whole outside shell man what a difference that has made now i'm not going to crawl under there right now and show this to you because i've already done a video on this okay set your wet bay up right and be done with it so if you want to see the details about that you can just 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 r19 i actually took this cover off right here i completely removed this and i put r19 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 you see all that i insulated all the entire walls and you see this here i did all of the pipes too with the insulation that foam tubing so this wet bay is totally insulated now to keep it warm to give it a little bit more uh protection i use this lamp right here this lamp i just keep clamped up there i run the extension cord down through the hole here where my water hoses and stuff like that comes and i run this to an electrical outlet with an extension cord and it has a 100 watt bulb in it you can get these at home depot 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 on top of my water filter i have strapped this is my bluetooth sensor here it comes with a monitor and two sensors i keep one of these sensors in the refrigerator so it gives me an accurate reading just by looking at the monitor what's inside the refrigerator but it also tells me what the temperature is in here too and i just keep this right there so i can literally monitor the temperature that's inside the wet bay at all times so as a quick review insulated the doors insulated the wet bay box used r19 all the way up and through and behind here i used the foam and and foil tape on all the plumbing and then use a light we've been in cold temperatures since then and i never have to worry about this now if it's getting down into the you know really cold temps you know low 20s in the teens i first of all i will not hook up my water uh all the filters on the on the spigot come off they go in the bay my hoses they because i don't want them to freeze get hard and crack them right so you don't hook up water when it gets that cold you use your 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 don't have to worry anything about that plumbing or those tanks freezing is 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 now i know a lot of diesel pushers have their house batteries in the back in another bay but most gas coaches have their batteries underneath the steps okay and that whole area where your batteries are it's all open right down to the ground and i cannot tell you how much cold air at night time will come in through here i i needed to fix this problem so what i did was is i knew i had to block this whole area so once again i went dumpster diving and i got a piece of thick cardboard once i had that template of how that cardboard will fit tight up against the door i took two pieces of that blue board and i taped them together here and i 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 is this lip right here is where it rests outside here and then this inner part snaps in here and we just push it in like that so at night time when we get ready to go to bed and it's cold that board goes on just like that it lifts out easy for an emergency and it snaps in easy when we're done with it or for the day or what have you i just pull it out and i slide it right down behind the love seat i do not keep this in the bays so i'm telling you this one little thing right here for the inside of the coach popping that in at nighttime that is going to get rid of a ton of cold air now i did have an idea of making it look pretty i was going to go to a fabric store and buy some burgundy fabric or something and spray it with some glue and and make it look prettier if you want to do that that's fine i've never gotten around to that now continuing inside the coach we just walked in the door and right here in the front cab area you have these storage areas right we got three doors up here and this is right under the front cap now this was another huge area that was allowing a lot of heat i mean in the summertime we'd open up one of these doors right here and the heat would just pour out and of course then the air conditioners have to work harder and all that kind of nonsense well guess what it does the same thing in the winter lots of cold air up in that area i'm just going to show you what i did here in the center storage bin but i've done it to all three of them and to demonstrate to you uh for this video i went ahead and emptied everything out of here and what i did these panels right here they come out they're just held by screws okay so when you drop this panel this whole area i mean look 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 totally empty and i took off this one and this one and you can see even up in there can you see all that insulation up there this whole entire area i packed with that r19 and this again has made a huge 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 right here see that and underneath those heaters there's a little storage compartment right up underneath here there's nothing there's no vents underneath there it's just a void area just to store stuff but that's another place where a draft will come through it comes right through the firewall from the engine bay and so what joanie does is she'll roll up a towel and she'll just 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 come up with a way to block that area but you know what as it turned out there's not much draft there there's a lot of electronics in there and i guess maybe the wall is the the firewall 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 right and when we first got this coach we realized we opened up these doors and i mean in the summertime the heat would just pour out of these cabinets and again it's just making our uh air conditioner work hard and all that and then in our first winter we felt this cold this this it was literally drafty in there and i'm like okay well 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 a lot of plumbing back there you have a lot of wiring harnesses and plumbing to feed the water up here and your drain hoses and all that and i'm like okay we need to do something about this so let me show you what we did under the sink what i did is i took this board off right here i'm not gonna i don't need to show you that but i had completely exposed everything behind here and i took this r19 again took the paper backing off and i put r19 all the way through here all up underneath the sink and all the way down into here and also went around all of the plumbing in there because it like i said there are several lines if you were to take this floor out right here in your coach man there is a bunch of stuff underneath here and so i insulated all that to keep the heat and the draft 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 in case you don't know how this works there's one of these little latches right here on either side of the drawer what you do is you simultaneously lift up on one side push down on the other and these drawers will come out once i had all these drawers removed i took that r19 insulation reached in there and i completely insulated the back wall right up here to the stove so this whole back wall here is all insulated another thing we do is we have three vents we have one over the kitchen one and a half bath and one in the full bath so you just take these uh vent pillows they have insulation foil on one side pillow on the other and you just push them up in there i'm going to go back to these pillows in a minute okay so here we are in my favorite room of the coach the bedroom and i'm sure your bed lifts up just like this just like ours does right but let me show you what i found out when i was getting our coach ready to go full time if you take the mattress and you pull it out you have this plywood bed area here and there's where the hinge is you see that that's where it lifts up and down but the first few weeks when we were sleeping in here men are 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 all the way off and you know what's underneath there nothing just some electrical lines a couple of plumbing lines and that was it it basically this whole area here which is about three feet wide and about six seven feet long was a totally void area an empty cavity and i'm like well no wonder but that area was so deep i could easily put in two layers of r19 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 type 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 uh but i do have a good suggestion for you one it's not only better than this one but it's cheaper and it's lighter this one here is pretty beefy i mean it's it's pretty heavy uh but it works great now what we do is we have a 35 foot coach and we put this in the living room and we plug it in and we set it at 70. this thing here 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 20 you know the low 30s or the high 20s or whatever then 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 you know i've talked to a lot of our friends who have those and that really works well in the living area but in the back in the bedroom not so much they have to usually put an additional smaller heater back there now but i've got some other suggestions back there too and i'll show you what we do but using a floor heater like this and the one that i'm going to 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 automatically go off they'll oscillate you can adjust the temperature to you know whatever you want 72 74 78 68 it doesn't matter and this right here i mean if you're in a campground and you're already paying for electric or you have electric i mean i just don't see any reason why you would not use an electric floor heater if you have full hookups this is the way to go using a floor furnace is so much cheaper than propane and we just store ours right up underneath the table easy to store easy to set up it's adjustable and it keeps this coach nice and toasty now let's go back to the bedroom and i'll show you what we do back there when it really gets cold we'll use this secondary heater you can see it's not very big and it's not very heavy and i put additional little stick pads on the bottom so when we put it on the counter it won't scratch the counter and we'll just plug that baby in there like that it has fan where it'll just blow just regular just air then it has heater one with all these settings and then two which is more accelerated and it's a little bit hotter putting on those settings we'll just put that up there like that and normally we'll put it on one we'll set it off about right there somewhere it's very quiet now this particular ceramic heater they don't cost much but we don't have pets and this one does not have a tip over feature now for joni and i we don't care we just plug it right up in here and set it and it's all good but if you have cats or anything else that jump up here and walk around and that thing tipped over it will not go off so when you're using something like this in the bedroom or in the living room you want that tip over automatic shut off feature but for us this one works just fine i'm going to again i'm going to be suggesting in the links below where i always give you all that stuff i'm going to give you this one here and a great floor model better than ours it's like i said it's lighter and cheaper and and much easier to source so those will be up here so i want to talk to you about one other option here that some people use and it's called mr heater it's a propane type of a heater now just imagine when you turn on your propane stove in the motorhome right you turn it on you click it the flames come up on your burner right you're burning propane there your area your coach needs to be vented that's why they tell you don't ever turn use your stove to heat your house because it puts out toxic gases if you're using that kind of heater you have to be aware of that too you have to have some windows or a couple of windows or a vent or two cracked open to be able to use that type of heater because of those fumes and everything that you get from a propane heater the other thing about mr heater is that they have the small propane bottles that you screw into the heater itself now those of you who have followed me you know i'm not a big fan of that stuff i mean it's just more stuff to buy more stuff to take up room more weight and all that stuff but if you are boondocking somewhere and you don't have full hookups to be able to use an electric heater well then a propane heater is a good way to go but we would not use that as our standard go-to type of heater okay mr heater is a good propane heater it has a tip over feature and all that type of stuff too but i only would recommend that if you do not have full hookups or you're boondocking overnight at a walmart or a cracker barrel or something like that which brings me to using your propane furnace in the parks there's been many times many times where we have been in a park a full hookup park and it gets cold at night and we've heard our neighbors next door or wherever fire up their propane furnace and i'm like why are they using their propane furnace you got full hookups why don't you just plug in a floor furnace propane is a whole lot more expensive than electricity and most campgrounds when you are staying there your electric comes with it anyway but even if you had to pay for electric in addition to your camping fees using an electric floor furnace like what we're showing you we do it's a whole lot more economic to use a floor electric floor furnace but getting back to the propane furnace uh maybe i'm missing something give me some comments down below and let me know if you use if you use propane furnace in a full hookup park and instead of using a floor electric furnace i'd like to know why just for my own knowledge but for martin i just don't see any sense and all that but i'd love to hear from you your argument on why you use it and why it would be better that would be good that would be good knowledge to know now another thing to uh keep your coach nice and toasty uh and we have done from time to time again when it's really cold okay i'm talking down into the 20s or the teens right we have used a heated mattress pad okay a heated mattress pad goes under the fitted sheet around the mat around the mattress okay so about maybe 30 minutes or so before you're getting ready to go to bed you come in and you turn on the um mattress pad and it'll get that bed nice and toasty so when you slip into those covers you can start spooning right away right but you know this particular heated mattress pad is dual controlled uh and the one i'm going to give a link to is awesome because it has long six foot controllers where you can tuck it away and have one for each side that way if the wife likes it warmer husband likes it cooler or whatever you can actually control each side so that's another way to kind of get the bedroom ready and keep it toasty before you go to bed now one last thing i want to cover here and this is really 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 when it's cold outside and you've got the coach inside nice and toasty you're going to create condensation on the windows and i'm going to show you right now how to deal with that so to deal with condensation which is going to happen if you keep this coach warm and it's cold outside you'll see water running down the windows and especially in our coach we have found the one that does the most condensating is our cabin windows and our windshield so what here's how we deal with this and this works great we have up front here we have two of these dehumidifiers it has a little tub back here you see you can see here we even still got some water from the other night still in there but you can just pull these out dump it put it back in and it works off of an electrical plug right here it has an on feature and off feature as we put one in each corner of the windshield and the way you hook it up it has this little plug right here you just plug it in and you have these little plugs right here and i'll run both of those to the center of the dashboard and i run an extension cord from on on the side of the passenger chair i run an extension cord up to there and plug them both in there once i turn these on i take the curtains and i pull these around like this if you have a shade put the shade down and what i do is i make a little covering here okay why am i doing that i'm doing that to prevent because again what's causing condensation heat on the inside cold on the outside that creates that condensation so by bringing both of the curtains around and keeping this area enclosed i'm kind of keeping the heat in the coach and away from the glass and that prevents the condensation but what we also do is you can see right here is we take two big towels this is only done in the winter we roll them up and we push them back in here so if condensation does drill down here it'll go into the towels i do not want that water to run down here in behind the dash and get into all of my electronics that are back there up underneath the dash okay so we'll put two towels there we'll put two dehumidifiers here enclose the front area with our curtains and that takes care of the front area again if it gets really cold and we've got i mean we've really got heat blowing through here we'll put another one of those dehumidifiers in the back bath in the back bathroom so now i want to get back to the van when you're really keeping the coach warm and it's cold outside and you've got you do not want to button up your coach the coach needs to breathe so you can do one of two things those pillows that i showed you that go up into the vents you can pop those pillows out in a couple of those vents and take the vent and just crack it maybe about that much okay one vent in the front one vent in the back or you can take a window now and crack a window now i'm not really a big fan on 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 crack just a little bit to allow fresh air to come into the coach and allow it to breathe well since i'm sitting right here this is a good place to give you some last closing comments we just passed our 1 million views on our youtube channel and it's all because of you guys uh that's just incredible so i again uh joni and i want to say thank you thank you thank you that would have never ever happened without you guys everything that i've explained here the heaters and the pillows and the the dehumidifiers all the stuff that we've talked about as always i'll have links below in the description text and also don't forget we got our amazon store now i kind of just can't believe i got that done but uh i'm really hoping that it helps you guys and it makes it so much easier we just go to one place and it's all going to be there but those of you who do use our links i want to tell you again from joni and i thank you thank you thank you uh for using our links to buy all your gear this not just the stuff that we use here but any gear using our store is a great way to say thank you and many of you have been using that uh our link so thank you so much i mean we're retired like most of you right i mean every little bit helps so anyway that's it for now guys this is how joni and i keep our coach warm in the winter time until next time this is rv street stick around [Music] you

Channel: RVstreet

Views: 155,732

Rating: 4.9252458 out of 5

Keywords: staying warm in an RV, insulating your RV, insulating RV tips, protect RV water pipes from freezing, RV heaters, insulate your RV for the cold, control condensation on RV windows, keeping warm in my RV, RV floor heaters, how To Stay Warm In Your RV, stay warm with full hook ups, keeping cold out of my RV, motorhome insulating tips, insulate your motorhome for the cold, protect RV water pipes, protect your motorhome from cold, winter RV living, stop RV window condensation

Id: yqZjE4aEoek

Length: 37min 31sec (2251 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 06 2020