DON'T FREEZE! - Insulating RV for Winter with Reflectix, Foam Board, & Skirting - RV Life

hey everyone i'm ro and i'm david and today we're going to be talking about insulation in our rv and as many of you know arby's don't have great insulation especially compared to a house so despite living in it full time it's actually much colder in here when the temperature outside drops and one thing that really contributes to how cold it is in here is our massive big picture window which actually is one of the massive selling points to getting this trailer for us yeah our windows are all single pane which is you know what they are in most travel trailers fifth wheels and motor homes and so the insulation value of a single pane window is just abysmal and we have windows all throughout our trailer like rowe said it was one of the main reasons we got it but you know now that we are going through a midwest winter this year in our travel trailer we are really searching for ways to increase the insulation value of our travel trailer as a whole and while we can't do that to our walls we can do that in some very specific locations the way we've chosen to help insulate our biggest source of heat loss which is our windows is by getting a big roll of this reflectix radiant barrier now it's not very thick yeah you know it's pretty thin so the actual insulation value of it isn't the best but it's something and we've actually decided to you know if we have enough of it in this role to do a double layer of this stuff and i've read online that if you can leave a dead air space between this and whatever you're putting it up on or against then the insulation value will be even higher so you know a lot of people use this stuff on their garage doors and they'll like adhere it directly to the garage door which doesn't give that dead air space however you can see this window that we've put this reflectix in you know i can push it in there is a nice dead air space and that will be on every one of our windows because we're not actually adhering it to we're just kind of cutting this larger than the opening is and just jamming it into the window and just using friction basically to hold this in place but after installing this reflectix into this one window we've noticed a huge improvement near this window so i've got this laser thermometer to test the temperatures at you know a bare window and of this reflectix and we can see the bare window is at right about 50 degrees fahrenheit and it's 37 degrees fahrenheit outside and then on the reflectix we are at right about 62 degrees so that's a 12 degree difference between the bare window and the window with reflectix and you know just by placing my hand next to it i can tell that this is so much warmer than the window itself and i'll go ahead and drop links in the video description below to this stuff as well as the other type of insulation that we're going to talk about in this video just so you can see how much it costs and you'll get the details on it for yourself in case you're interested in using it for your application now installing the reflectix into the window is really easy and it's especially easy if you have a big lip or really any type of lip on your rv windows now most of our windows don't have a lip like this but this window does and what i would recommend doing on all of the windows regardless of whether they have a lip is to cut your reflectix slightly bigger i would say about an eighth inch bigger than what you measure the span of that window opening to be just so there is an interference fit so when you push it in you know that it it will be held into that window space by friction and the reflectix won't just want to fall just like flop out because it's not rigid it is very flexible and so if you don't have some sort of interference fit there it will just kind of want to like bow out and just fall out so i'll take this measurement and what i'm seeing is 29 and an eighth inch wide so i'm going to cut it at 29 and a quarter inches wide and then for the height roughly we are at about 19 inches so then i'm gonna cut the height to be 19 and an eighth so all i'm using to measure and cut this reflectix radiant barrier is a stanley knife a tape measure and then a straight edge and so you know when i go to cut this i can push down on the straight edge and run the stanley knife directly against it just to make sure that i get a straight cut okay [Applause] [Applause] so now we've got this cut but we still have one more thing to do before we can put it in there as you can see our windows are rounded on the corners so we just need to trim out the corners of this and i don't even bother measuring that because you know these these corners can just kind of be jammed in there too and help to um you know sort of have that friction to hold it in there so i just kind of cut them like that just round the corners and i found that that works perfectly well enough and if i don't if i don't round them enough i can always just you know pull this back out from the window and just cut an even you know larger radius um like yeah i don't think that one is quite enough so i'll just trim a little extra off really it's not that big of a deal because this stuff is so flexible you know you'll be able to just jam it in there so well we'll take that a little more off of that one okay and then let's put it in and see how it fits oh wait this one yeah actually all right see we've got this bar right here in ours so i'm going to just cut it's going to need a small relief cut in it that i didn't think about until just now not too wide right there and if your windows have any sort of uh you know fixtures like that in the way you can always just trim out a little relief i know for our back window it opens up with knobs and so we're gonna have to cut little openings you know for those knobs for that huge rear picture window like i said i cut this oversize so it doesn't you know really want to go in there oh come on [Applause] there we go [Applause] all right one window down then we've got it cut for the rest of the windows we can stuff them into those ones too and this window doesn't have a lip unfortunately like i said it's really nice if they all have a lip this one doesn't so like i said i'm hoping that the friction from this being cut oversize just kind of holds this in place there we go and we also have these blinds which we can pull down that's just you know another barrier may as well have those clothes if we can so [Applause] so and then this big rear picture window the one for it it's gonna be a little bit of a pain to fit in there just because it's so big and we have some knobs and stuff that we need to cut around but we'll get her in there would you like some help no i'm good you have a lot of junk back here but i'll get it in there kind of sticks out a lot because you know there's a bar that runs sideways and a bar that runs vertically up to here so it sticks out a bit but again that will make that'll create a lot of dead air space behind this and i i think that's going to actually help increase the insulation value with that dead air space and there we go every window is now insulated i think this is going to help a ton we've also placed insulation in some key exterior points now for example this is our outdoor shower and while we don't use it every single day when we're out camping in the middle of nowhere we do use it pretty often to do laundry so this leads directly into the cabinet in our bathroom and that means that if this wasn't insulated the only thing that would protect the cold from leaking all over into the bathroom is this really thin flap this is just plastic and it's i'm wearing gloves and it's freezing so we have stuffed this blueboard styrofoam insulation in here and it is stuck it is nice and stuck in there so you know the cold air doesn't really seep in there very well and that means that underneath our cabinet in the bathroom stays much much warmer which means that our bathroom overall stays much much warmer unlike if we didn't have this in here it would be pretty difficult to keep our bathroom warm just because of the cabinet and then over here this is our shore power plug storage line and we also have the blue board foam insulation and this is stuck in here even harder so there's no way i'd ever be able to get this out with some serious help but this cord just winds up right under our fridge you can see this is the um exterior access access point to our fridge which means that this just close up right under our fridge well at the bottom of our fridge is this super thin piece of luan so cold air used to seep in here all the time you can see just around this cord you can see the styrofoam insulation so the cold air just seeped in there big time and it meant that under our fridge and right around our fridge was always really really cold so just adding this small piece of foam insulation has made it so that that area isn't cold anymore and then some of you may remember from when we did our table renovation in the rv we blocked off this storage bay completely if i can open it here also with blue board insulation we don't use the storage anymore because it just goes right inside the trailer but we needed to make sure that this didn't stay cold especially when we came to cold times like this so we stuffed this full of the blueboard foam insulation too and this is really jammed in here too sure i could probably punch it in or whatever but i'm not gonna and this has made it so that when we're sitting at our desk none of the cold air that would normally seep through here actually gets down to our feet or anything and we stay nice and warm even on the desk in this cold weather now we have two more in um storage made doors they're up near the front of the trailer i'll show you really quick just how small they are they're about the same size and we want to do the blue board insulation on these as well we have one on this side and one on the other this is a pass-through storage bay the problem is is that the lip for this door is actually on the outside meaning that the only way to be able to insulate this is from the inside and as you can imagine it might be a little difficult to get the insulation in here [Applause] so you can see the lip for the door sits right here which means the lip where the insulation can fit is right here and since we can't insulate both of these doors from the inside at the same time we're not entirely sure how we're going to do this yet we've thought about doing like little holes where like a wire hanger can go in and then pull it nice and tight and then close this but the fit can't be super tight because we have to be able to pull it closed and we're not going to do that with just simple wire hooks so we haven't fully figured out how we want to insulate this but we do want to in the meantime we have this light in here we've show we've shown it once before to keep it just above freezing so that this bay doesn't get too terribly cold but that's a good you know those are good options for you guys um good options for you guys if you're thinking about trying to insulate some of your storage bay doors the reason we care about this these two storage bay doors also being insulated is uh not only are our batteries in here and discharging and charging them below freezing can be very harmful to them but also our bed sits right on top of this and that means that the cold that might be seeping into here could make our bed cold or just our bed area cold so the warmer we can keep the storage bay doors the warmer it'll stay inside overall another small outdoor location that is likely going to let a lot of cold air seep into your rig especially rigs that have stoves is this right here and it's our vent above our stove and ours is currently closed with some tape but we don't have insulation in it because this spot is very oddly shaped it angles in it's got this bar in the middle here so we haven't fully figured out what we want to put in there in order to insulate it so right above our stove does get pretty cold when it gets you know especially below freezing so if any of you do have a solution to this already that you have figured out please let us know down in the comments below um because i don't want we don't want to break this bar off in order to put insulation in here we just want it to fit nicely and still do a good job so if you've already figured it out let us know something that a lot of people do to help keep their rv warmer in the winter is to install skirting around the outside and that is absolutely a great option because it keeps the cold wind from blowing under the trailer and stealing heat from the floor so if you don't have that skirting your floors are going to be a lot colder and you're going to lose a lot of a lot more heat through the floor um we could do skirting but this is our first winter and we're gonna see how it goes without skirting i mean it's our first it's not our first winter as full-time rv years but it's our first cold winter we've been in arizona and southern california every other winter you know we're snow birds but this time we're staying in the midwest so we're gonna see how it goes without that skirting because one it's really expensive and two to install it you have to drill buttons into the side of your trailer all over the place uh and also we don't really have a whole lot of extra storage space in our trailer or in the bed of our truck to store all of that tarping for the skirt so you know just because we want to save that storage room and we don't want to drill into our trailer and we don't want to um you know spend gosh i to get high quality skirting it's i'm pretty sure it's over 500 maybe maybe even approaching a thousand correct me if i'm wrong guys but that's what i seem to remember um but yeah we want to avoid that however if you guys are going to be staying somewhere where it's going to be cold relatively often then skirting around the outside is an excellent idea and it is very highly recommended and another space in our travel trailer and many many rvs that is also a huge culprit for heat loss is the exhaust fan you know again it's just a very thin layer of plastic separating this area from the outside and when it's you know below freezing outside stick your hand up here it is extremely cold so we're doing the same thing to insulate this area we've got some blue well pink board it's the same stuff foam insulation and except to help insulate this what we've also done is we have uh hot glued this reflectix to the other side just to help give it you know a radiant barrier um to you you know we think that this will help insulate this whole area also and i've done the same thing in that this is a very tight fit so it's going to stick up in there and not really give any space for cold air to seep down through and all right so just jam that on up there too that's a nice tight fit and yeah i think that's going to do a really good job insulating that space also but that is it that is how we add insulation to you know parts of our trailer that are you know incredibly poorly insulated where cold air can just seep in you know this reflectix on the window i think is going to be a huge improvement on these single pane windows and all the insulation that we're able to put into you know those areas that are only covered by a very thin layer of plastic yeah and while we can't insulate our walls better we can insulate our windows better and that is what's going to help keep it warm in here instead of letting you know i was warming it up in here just seep out through those cold windows yeah and another thing you that you might guys may have already thought of this you might not have but since we're actually hooked up to electric right now um we are heating our trailer using just two 750 watt space heaters one back here in the primary living space and then one on the opposite side of our trailer and just having two 750 watt space heaters running you know intermittently has kept the inside of our trailer very very warm yeah so our our propane furnace rarely even has to run so if you guys are staying at rv parks in the winter just think about getting some you know 20 30 space heaters and that will save you on propane but i you know that's all for this video i hope it was helpful in you know helping you guys get some insulation ideas so that you can keep yourself warm in the winter in your rv or trailer and we will see you guys next time bye bye sweetie girl sweetie you want to say goodbye say bye bye you don't want to say goodbye [Music] you

Channel: Fate Unbound

Views: 160,795

Keywords: rv, full, time, rving, rver, full time rv, full time rving, full timing, rv life, rv living, full time rv life, full time rv living, fate, unbound, fate unbound, travel, trailer, travel trailer, traveling, camping, adventure, full time rv couple, vlog, video blog, DON'T FREEZE! - Insulating RV for Winter with Reflectix Foam Board & Skirting - RV Life, insulation, insulating, insulate, reflectix, radiant, radiant insulation, skirting, window insulation, rv insulation, insulating rv, warm, cold, winter

Id: uu2HDSZ2u50

Length: 22min 37sec (1357 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 10 2020