What should I do?

[Fishski2470]

I am arriving this week into Idaho where we are moving. We have been on the road for a year and now are going to live in a house and store the airstream in a covered storage unit. It is not heated but has electricity so I suppose I could do a small space heater. I plan to periodically use it during winter so I’m unclear if full winterization is right or some other approach. I did a thorough dump and clean and have 20% in black. Any suggestions as I feel I am kind of in between

[Rolind]

I would fully winterize your airstream, and if you camp in the winter, carry your fresh water in a blue 5-6 gallon jug, “flush” the toilet with antifreeze, and carry a heat gun to thaw out the black and gray water valves that are frozen shut.

[Caffeinated]

Were I you, I’d do what I do here. Here, by the way, is the Willamette valley OR, where it is presumably a bit warmer than Idaho in the winter.

I park my trailer in a enclosed garage, attached to the house, where the whole house gas heater also resides. The garage has not been below 36 degrees in the past few years. Yes, I have a remote temp sensor in the garage. But just in case, before cold weather hits, I blow out all the lines with an air compressor, drain all the tanks, and put some rv antifreeze in the sink and shower traps, drained the hot water heater. And called it good. Easy to do, doesn’t take much time, and I’m confident I’ll be good to come spring.

[richard5933]

If you're parked in an unheated space in Idaho you definitely need to winterize. No space heater is going to be enough to keep the tanks and plumbing from freezing, especially in Idaho winters.

If you plan to use the trailer in the winter for somewhere warmer, then just keep it winterized till you get far enough south to flush it out and use water as normal. Re-winterize before leaving for Idaho again. It takes less than 45 minutes to winterize once you get the system down.

If you are going to be using the trailer in the north where it's cold, follow the advice given above. Just use pink antifreeze to flush and carry drinking water.

Either way winterize before storing or we might be seeing you opening a thread in the spring asking how to fix the leaks.

[Jeff7176]

Before we hit the road full-time, we always used our trailer 12 months a year. We lived in DC, and while it’s nowhere near Idaho cold, we regularly saw below freezing temps all winter and stored our trailer outside. I always used an air compressor to blow out the lines after ensuring the tanks had all been drained, then added RV antifreeze to all the traps and a little in the toilet bowl. I always did that as part of our campground departure checklist. It probably added 30 minutes to the normal departure process. If we camped without hookups, I would hold off on blowing the lines until we got back home.