Ultimate Guide to Getting Your RV Ready for Camping Season | De-winterization | Ep. 24

IT'S ALMOST CAMPING SEASON!!!

Well, maybe not quite...but with the sun shining on the snow here in Ontario, we know it's going to be spring soon! And as we write this it's Groundhog Day where Canada's own Wiarton Willy has predicted an early spring.

Join Dan on today's episode we chat about the step by step things you need to do to your trailer to get it camp-ready for all your 2021 adventures! Specifically, we'll talk about:

• What to check if you've been storing your trailer before you hook it up and drive away into the sunset
• How to flush out the antifreeze in your system 
• How to safely and properly sanitize your freshwater system for healthy water all season long
• What systems we test to make sure we don't have any first trip surprises

For a full accounting, don't forget to check out the blog. If you listen via apple, we'd really love to receive any reviews you have. Just scroll to the bottom of the RV Canucks podcast page and give us a star rating, and leave a written review of what you love about the show or want to hear more about. We are always eternally grateful for the feedback!

Transcript

0 (0s):
<inaudible> hello.

1 (5s):
Hey everybody. Welcome to episode 24 of the RV Canucks podcast. Today, we are talking about the most wonderful time of the year, and that is de winterizing your trailer for the spring camping season. If you're joining us for the first time. Welcome again, I am Molina and I cross for me is my hunky hunky husband, Dan, hello, and together with our teen and tween. We are the RV connects and accident prone, Griswold style, family of four, who traverse North America in our travel trailer and want you to come along for the ride. As we share tips, tricks, and stories that show you how easy it can be to travel further on your vacations from work.

1 (47s):
And I am just going to say that I can not wait until Eila is also a teen this summer. So I don't have to say teen and tween anymore. So I'm just going to be a sidekick on this episode because Dan does all the D winterization. And that's probably not a good thing because we actually preach on this show all the time that both parties in a marriage or a relationship or an RV coupling should know how to do everything. But I must admit that I have never do winterize the trailer. So I'm just here to add color commentary. So take it away, Dan.

2 (1m 19s):
Okay. So I'm going to talk about all the steps that I go through when we pick up our trailer from storage and get it ready to go out for the first trip of the season, we store ours about 15, 20 minutes away from our house. Probably 15 minutes away from our house. And in order to de winterize it, or maybe more cheerly call it, summarize it. Oh, I like that. We need to bring it home because you need lots of water to do this really. So if you already keep yours at home over the winter, just kind of amend this as required. But for a lot of people who store it offsite, or they haven't done this in a while, or they're new to RV, I'll walk you through what I do. Pull up to the trailer before I hit you up. I get out, do a quick walk around of the trailer, make sure there's no obvious damage to the outside.

2 (2m 2s):
Check the tires, make sure they've got air in them so that you're not towing on flat tires, hitch up, connect the truck and the trailer, put the battery in all those kinds of things. Make sure that the lights work. Do we want to talk about boards boards? So if you park in some areas, maybe on not on pavement or not inside storage, and you're just parking on an open field, you might want to park your trailer on boards, which is going to spread out the weight and stop it from sinking into the ground.

1 (2m 31s):
<inaudible> huge because unless you have a really good four by four on your truck, sometimes it sinks so far. You're going to have trouble getting it

2 (2m 37s):
Right. We've had this happen to us before where it's sunk into the ground and I've had to use four wheel drive to get the trailer out. It didn't damage anything, but it just makes it a whole lot easier. So once you're hooked up your lights work, as in brake light, signal lights, all that kind of stuff, make sure that you go back inside the trailer and close up anything that you propped open for the winter. So if you propped open your fridge in your freezer or left the door, open inside just to help with air flow, make sure those things are all closed up and that there's nothing in there. That's going to fall on the ground or slam shut when you pull away and then take it to where you're going to summarize.

1 (3m 14s):
I will just pop in to say that, please store your trailer with the fridge and the freezer. Open mold issues are notorious and hard to get rid of once they take foot in your RV frigid freezer. So our normal routine, when we go to target and not even just parking it for the season, but between trips is that we ensure that it's dry. Like we open it up. We empty, you know, they tray inside that when the fridge defrosts fills up with water, I dry it with some paper towels. And then I leave either a tea towel or some paper towels at the bottom of the fridge capture any other drips that may happen when it finishes defrosting, but the fridge and the freezer are wide open. We have never, ever, ever had a mold problem.

2 (3m 53s):
And it's as simple as leaving, like the fruit and vegetable tray pulled out, or one of the shelves pulled out just a little bit to crack it an inch or two. This isn't doesn't need lots of gadgets, right? So the next thing you're going to do, take it to where you're going to summarize it. Now you can do this in your lane way, or one thing you might want to consider is doing it at a local RV park, not far from your house. And so you'll might remember when we talked about winterization and what we did at the end of last season was we went to a place that's five minutes from our house, just outside of town, full hookups, electricity, water, sewer, the work's backed in there. And we spent the weekend there doing maintenance. And so the reason I say that is because it's going to maybe if you've got a tight driveway in town or in the city, this is going to give you a lot more room to work.

2 (4m 39s):
You're going to go through a lot of water and this is going to let it drain away and hopefully keep the mess to a minimum and away from your house. And it also just lets you hook everything up and see how it's working. The reason I say do at five minutes from your house is cause if calamity strikes or there's a problem, you're five minutes from home. You know, it's not that big a deal to pack everybody up and go home. So once you get back in and you're ready to start, I I'd say, take another walk around your trailer and just have a good look for any obvious problems. You don't necessarily need to solve them now, but now's when you want to start to make an inventory of that stuff and think about when you're going to fix them and get them ready to go so that you're not finding something at the last minute or finding something at, at a campground.

2 (5m 21s):
So go through, check your seals, take a nice, slow walk around the trailer with a cup of coffee, make sure nothing's cracked that there's no gaps. And you'll probably, this is an ongoing issue. You're just going to have to maintain your seals. And that'll minimize the amount of water damage that you're going to get in the trailer over the years. Think about cleaning your rubber roof. So if you've got a trailer with a rubber roof, make sure that you think about cleaning it. I'm not saying you need to clean it in the spring, but you need to clean your rubber roof at least once a year, maybe a little bit more depending on kind of what tree drippings you might get on it. But think about maybe this is the right time or the right weekend to do it because you're not committed to trying to get to the beach or visit with family or see friends or, or things of that nature. The purpose of your weekend is maintenance and getting the trailer ready for the rest of the summer.

2 (6m 4s):
Go inside again. You're looking for interior damage leaks, anything from rodents or mice probably need to run a vacuum through it regardless. And so that's what you're looking to do internally inside the trailer. And then the next stage, if you've winterized your trailer properly and it's got water, hookups is you need to flush the antifreeze out of the system. So you've got RV antifreeze it's been pulled through your system, stops your pipes and your plumbing from leaking are exploding over the course of the winter. You need to flush that out. So what you're going to do, you're going to connect to the city water and run the water through your system. Until that pinkish red color is gone out of your system. Once that's gone out of your system and the water coming out of all your taps is the color of water.

2 (6m 48s):
You flushed out the antifreeze. What I will remind you is that if you've got an outdoor shower, you need to do it at the outdoor shower. You need to do it at the indoor shower, the toilets, the sinks, every single device that pushes out water in your trailer. You need to flush out the antifreeze once that's done. I know that there's a lot of people call it ready to go. And that's not really the case. A couple of things you need to make sure of. You need to make sure that you have all your water valves that were set on bypass for the winterization set back to normal, which lets water circulate through your system, lets the hot water tank connect and, and send hot water into your system and the way that you would expect it to. So again, make sure that your hot water tank has been emptied out of any antifreeze that's in there as well.

2 (7m 30s):
And there shouldn't be right. Sometimes you're going to get any freeze inside your hot water tank. It's not the end of the world. You just need to make sure that the entire system is connected and flushing out water. You also need to do your holding tank, which means you need to disconnect that hose, hook it up to your fresh water holding tank and then you need to flush your holding tank. And the way that you're going to do that is you're going to fill up your holding tank and then you're going to drain your holding tank. And then you're going to fill up your holding tank and then you're going to drain your holding tank. And then you're gonna fill up your holding tank. And then you're going to drain your holding tank until that water runs clear. Once you've done that, all the antifreeze is out of your system. This doesn't take a lot of time. It takes you half an hour, 45 minutes, the next stage. And oftentimes you're going to find the instructions for this in the manual for your RV, for the exact ratio, you should sanitize your water system.

2 (8m 16s):
And what that means is you're going to put in a little bit of bleach and water. You're going to pull all that water through the water lines and all the faucets so that when you open them up, you smell that smell of bleach and water coming out of your water lines. What this does is it sanitizes all the bacteria and anything that might have accumulated over the winter over your last season. That's just in there. The, the gunk that might make you sick, it's going to sanitize your entire system helps keep you healthy, stops the whole family from getting the poop

1 (8m 48s):
And see, what did I tell you? Are we connects? We have to mention poop at least once an episode. Oh my gosh, but we sanitize our tanks, but we also use it in conjunction with like an inline water filter that you would hook up to the water hose and then the tap, which just helps with taste and things like that as well.

2 (9m 5s):
Right? So you're not going to hook up the inline water filter when you do this. That's something you'll use on every other trip, but this is just sanitizing. The inside. The reason you probably want to consider doing this, maybe at a campground is you're going to go through a lot of water and it's going to let it drain away. But what you're going to do is in our unit, our instructions is to let this bleach solution sit for eight hours. So while it's sitting for eight hours, you can do any of that outside maintenance that you want to take the kids for a walk. The only thing you're not going to have is water. Now you can use the toilet and you can flush the toilet, but you're not going to be able to wash your hands. And you're not going to be able to pour any drinking water for eight hours.

1 (9m 45s):
I also make a quick point because this is something I see coming up a lot is that you don't need a lot of bleach per water ratio to get the job done. I know people feel like pouring more bleach into it is going to do a better job or solve the problem. But you actually only need a quarter cup of bleach for every 16 gallons of water. That's an ounce of bleach for every eight gallons of water. So the reason you don't want to put too much bleach in is because putting too much in, you're actually going to wreck the seals on your holding tanks, your toilets, things like that. Bleach is really, really hard on those rubber seals,

2 (10m 19s):
Right? So once you've done that, it's sad. It's in our case eight hours. The next thing that you're going to do is you're going to reconnect your water back up to your city water. And you're going to flush your tanks until you don't smell bleach anymore. That's as simple as that. Once you flushed out those water lines so that there's no bleach smell coming out of the shower, the outdoor shower, the outdoor sink, the indoor sink, the lines are clear. Disconnect, your city, water drain your fresh water holding tank. Fill up your help, fresh water holding tank, drain your fresh water holding tank a couple of times. And you've flushed all the bleach out of this is out of the system. Your water's ready to go. If you use your trailer on a regular basis throughout the summer, you really don't need to worry because you're continually flushing more water through the system in the same way that the pipes in your house continually have water going through the system.

2 (11m 6s):
If you don't use your trailer a lot for a prolonged period, you might want to repeat this process more than once a year. But I find for our family that uses it every couple of weeks, we've never had a problem. If it's the first thing that I do at the beginning of the summer season, next thing you want to make sure is that you test all of your appliances and all of the features on your trailer. And this is why it's good to be close to home because if something doesn't work, you're not too far away, that you can't just pack everybody up and take them home. So what I'd like to do first is I'd like to start the gas top stove. The reason I test the gas stove inside the trailer, even though we don't use it very much, is it poles more propane through the rest of the system quicker so that those devices will spark up a little bit quicker.

2 (11m 46s):
Cause keep in mind if you've disconnected your propane for the whole year and shut off your tanks, there's no propane in your lines and they need to fill. So once I've the stove running, then I'll check the fridge and I'll run it on propane and or running on electric. I'll check the hot water tank, both on propane, both on electric. The key to running your hot water tank is making sure that there's water in the tank. And so whether we arrive at a campground at a filling station or a site with full hookups, or it's the beginning of the year, there's a pressure regulator valve inside the little access panel on the outside of your trailer. You can flip that up. Water should shoot out and then you know that there's water going into your tank and then you can heat it up. And you know, your tank, if it takes half an hour, it takes an hour.

2 (12m 29s):
Once the tank is hot, the tank is hot. Make sure that you get hot water out of your, out of your faucets. When you want hot water and cold water, when you want cold water. And then you know that all your water bypass valves have been set correctly. I think that's really key to everything. That whole process is probably going to take you a day that eight hours while your, your lines are being sanitized as the time you can do any outside maintenance too. If you want to, couple other things I will remind you of is make sure that your battery is charged up. When you go out to the trailer, you probably should have removed your battery in the winter, brought it into the garage or some heated space, just to make sure that it gets a deep cycle maintenance charge over the course of the winter. And that it's not completely dead.

2 (13m 10s):
Another good thing I like to do is I like to lubricate the stabilizing Jackson. I'll do that a few times throughout the year. It just stops that grinding squealing sound. When they go down. Another thing I'd say is check your spare tire. It's a couple of minutes, go back to the back and make sure that there's air in your spare tire because it's never happened to me with the RV trailer, but it's happened to me with the snowmobile trailer that we got a flat tire coming home and I couldn't use the spare tire cause I had forgotten to make sure that the spare tire had air in it. So that was a little bit embarrassing, but make sure those kinds of things are ready to go. And then I think you would probably be pretty much ready to get started on the rest of your season, but I would strongly advocate for doing all the work at once dedicating one day, day and a half to it so that you can enjoy the rest of the season and not have to worry about it.

2 (13m 54s):
And you can enjoy your RV for the purposes that it was designed, which was to have a good family experience.

1 (13m 59s):
Absolutely. And that's it folks, thank you, Dan, for that wisdom, I am super, super, super excited to get out and camping this spring. And I will re listen to this podcast myself when I have to de winterize or I'm sorry, what did you say? Summarize, summarize the trailer by myself this year. So maybe there will be some color commentary on a future podcast of a full of four-letter words when I don't listen or interpret it. Right. But I'm sure these instructions will be very easy to follow. Absolutely. Okay. Then that's it. We will talk to you again and a couple of weeks

3 (14m 35s):
Bye-bye.