Round 3: Cold

Let's fast forward to our winter on Vancouver Island. We were short on funds and couldn't afford skirting. We had to find creative ways to save on heating bills, do it one step at a time, and still avoid freezing water lines.

Step one was the windows. RV window frames are usually aluminum to save weight. This is, of course, completely useless for insulation. Put your hand on your window frame in summer on a sunny day and you'll see what I mean. The same works in reverse; heat in your house goes straight out the window (frame). Most RVs also have single pane windows, also nearly useless on insulation.

Yes, this works.

The outside came first. Even the slightest barrier between the air and the aluminum drastically reduced heat transfer, and you could tell. We found that the double-sided tape that comes with the window shrink film doesn't stick very well to fibreglass, but that also could have been the cold as we started late. Even still, we recommend going around the outside of the plastic with strips of packing tape to guarantee a good seal that won't be ripped away by the wind.

The hard part.

Going around the moisture drains was annoying, but everything we read said to try to keep these open if you can. And... well... yeah... you really, really should keep them open. I managed to forget to do so on one window.

Mmm, yummy.

The outer barriers did a fair amount for the frames; moisture build up dropped to almost nothing even before we got the dehumidifier, and the house's cold spots drastically reduced. It still wasn't enough, so the interior came next.

This was way more difficult than it should have been.

The weather had already started to turn, and the frames were perpetually cold. The glue on the double-sided tape doesn't cure well in low temperatures. And as I've said previously, nothing sticks to our walls - not even duck tape, masking tape or packing tape. I couldn't do a full covering on the inside the way I'd done on the outside, so I had to cut out pieces of tape to fit all the curves on the frame, one piece at a time. Then, I had to go around the frame with the hair drier (Lyndsay doesn't have a hair drier so we had to borrow that one) in order to keep the glue warm until it cured. Once that had cured, I could put on the plastic, but had to do the same thing again to make sure the glue cured to the plastic. I lost several sheets of film before figuring all of this out.

But we can still open some windows.

We still wanted to be able to clear the air in the house from time to time without leaving the door wide open, so we left film off of one window in each room, only placing it on the outside with the tape directly on the frame. Then we could crack the windows and run the fans to move fresh air through the house.

This thing... sucks.

Everything we read about our propane heater warned us that it wasn't built for heavy use. Case in point, the person we borrowed that hair drier from had been keeping her propane heater on almost all the time in an effort to keep it warm and preventing moisture buildup (they went through twice as much propane as we did before we bought the oil radiator to help reduce propane usage). Her heater broke and it cost hundreds of dollars to get it fixed. And what broke that cost so much? A single switch. A switch that turns the heater on and off. One. Single. Switch. Her trailer was three years newer than ours.

Originally we had a ceramic fan heater, but it broke. More bad advice from the Glitz and Glammers, we bought the above oil radiator to replace it. While it did a fair job of reducing propane use, the ceramic heater was phenomenally more efficient. The heat from the radiator has a tendency to only go out so far, and most of it rises straight to the ceiling. The fan heater circulates the air, preventing a single warm spot from developing and helping move air to cold spots. But, we already dropped $100 on an oil radiator, so we lived with what he had for the winter. We are planning on replacing this with a ceramic fan heater soon.

As we kept an eye on the changing weather, we had two options with the water hose: insulate it or buy a heated hose. After mathing out the the cost of insulating (along with the work involved with doing so), we bought a 25-foot long heated water hose (50-foot long also available).

We were the only ones in the park that didn't have a frozen water line when the first cold snap hit.

The cold staying outside! Wait... did I check the roof? Be right back...

It doesn't snow often in the Comox Valley, but it does snow. And it is heavy and wet. To prevent damage, you need to get on top of the RV and push it off. This was a harrowing experience as the rubber roof was extremely slippery. I skidded around and almost fell off the roof close to a dozen times. For the most part the roof handled the cold and snow fine, but it didn't fully survive.

Look closely... That's packing tape.

My foot went through the bathroom skylight. And there was nothing I could do about it for several days while I waited for the snow to melt and roof to dry. All I could do was cover it with tape to seal it.

This made us miss Manitoba a bit...

But the one thing that drove us most up the wall was the people of Vancouver Island. Everything shut down. I drove a front wheel drive Corolla home from work with all-season tires while people with winter tires and all wheel drive were sliding off the road. Granted, I see that in Winnipeg as well, but not in the numbers I was seeing on the Island. People had no idea what they were doing. It was also one of the last days that a friend of ours was visiting from Manitoba and we wanted to go out for dinner with him. In all of the Comox Valley, only one single restaurant was open. Lyndsay ranted for a long time about how Islanders weren't real Canadians if they couldn't handle a little bit of snow. Shout out to the Fluid Bar and Grill for being the only Canadian restaurant in the Comox Valley!

Palm tree... snow... wait... what... no... *twitching*

The next problem was the insanely cold floors, especially by the door. It wasn't only uncomfortable, but you could tell we were losing heat through the vinyl.

Yes, that's a robot vacuum. No, it doesn't work on rubber.

The foam rubber pads completely solved that problem. I cut them to fit with a knife and pieced them together. Our propane usage and electric bills went down noticeably, probably close to 10%. A skirt definitely would have been a good idea, but they cost so much and we were too tight on funds so we had to find creative solutions.

The final problem was how cold our bedroom got. Aurora's room was never so cold. The underpasses on travel trailers get no heat, have terrible insulation, and at least on ours the frame is aluminum. Towards the end of winter, we were able to buy foam board and spray foam insulation to finish our adventures in adding R-value to the trailer.

This is a lot more work than you think it will be when you start.

I purchased R-5 foam board and doubled it. I cut it to fit in between the frame pieces and used a special adhesive. The boards then needed to be propped up over night for the adhesive to cure before I could add the second layer of foam board. As we had things stored in the underpass, I had to do one side at a time. As the insulation was added, the room was warmer each night.

As I mentioned in Round 2: Mold, we had mold in the walls in our room. This was due to the cold spots created by the underpass. Those cold spots are now entirely gone, so insulating your underpass properly serves two purposes.

It was a lot of work over a long period of time, but we managed.

Round three... we'll call it a tie.