Will We Survive? North Dakota RV Living

My husband and I live full-time in our RV up in North Dakota and we just experienced a polar vortex dropping our temperatures as low as negative 27 degrees Fahrenheit. If you guys were around last year you probably saw everything that we went through from the polar vortexes completely freezing up our water several times to having inches of frost on all of our slide outs. But this year we decided to make some big changes and we jumped on it before the winter season hit so today in this video I'm going to show you everything that we did in October of last year to prepare ourselves better for this winter season. We're pretty much done with the polar vortex so I'm going to take you guys back to October and show you everything that we did to get the RV ready for winter. All the preparations and all the changes that we made compared to last year and then I'm going to bring you forward to now which is we're pretty much done with the polar vortex and let you know how everything went down and if we handled it well so stay tuned. We're about to go into our second winter here in North Dakota which means we have a lot to do. We have changed so many things compared to last year so I'm going to take you guys around the camper today and show you everything that we've upgraded and what we're doing different for this season. We have changed quite a bit from the skirting really is staying the same but our heaters underneath we're upgrading those and we're also insulating our slide outs this year we didn't do that last year well we did we tried in January and a windstorm came and ripped it all off and we just never went back to it because by that point it was way too cold so this year we're going to be insulating our slides. We already got two of the slide outs done we have to do two more today. Pretty much what we got going on this is just the start of it we still have to do more but we basically just went and got this from Menards and then the tape we went on top and around the sides and then obviously the skirting on these slides is covered so we don't have to worry about the bottom. We will be insulating this cubby as well because last winter this is where our bed sits and that's where we got the black mold under our mattress was because there was tons of cold air coming in here and you can see I painted that but it was causing condensation from the heat above and then this being cold so we're gonna have to insulate this cubby before it gets really cold. Buddy, he's our little baby. Little baby. We love him so much. At this point we did have a few arguments because we weren't agreeing with each other on how we wanted to insulate the slides. I wanted to do more and my husband wanted to do less but eventually we came down to a solution. Christian is just fixing the top of the slide because we had wind the other day and it ripped it off so I think what we're gonna do is take this Reflectix and we're gonna wrap it around the outside of the skirt or the sides and then probably ratchet strap them or tie them down so that way it doesn't fly away because we had a big windstorm and it completely started ripping off the top of this one. This is our crappy job we had to cut these to fit it properly in there. So the funny part about this is we went back and forth on whether we wanted to wrap the slides with the Reflectix on the outside to keep it dry but then we just ultimately decided that it just wasn't worth our time and that the boards that we had put there would be enough. Another big issue that we ended up having earlier in the year was that we had a black tank leak which was absolutely disgusting. We had to go underneath the trailer pull everything apart and fix it my husband used some JV weld and it's been working amazing we have had no issues ever since we did that. This day felt like it was never ending between having to insulate all of the slides and go underneath the trailer to fix this problem it was really a long day but we're happy that we got it done because when winter hit this was the last thing that we wanted to do. Christian's gonna drain the hot water because he's gonna try and fix that leak. Well that's how corroded it already is. I almost just replaced that already. It hasn't even been in there six months. You just replaced that. I have another one. You do? Yeah. Glad we're doing this not in the winter that would be a huge ice puddle right there. Oh wow there's quite a bit in this. So maybe you should change out that thing. You could flush it. So gross. Ew. Don't create another leak. We are tying it down we're gonna just do one slide with this because we are arguing about this a lot so we're just gonna do one side and see how it works. We're gonna get this slide done real quick and then probably finish that slide sometime next week. You're so handsome. Yeah. Now this piece gets narrower as it goes down. Oh is that the one I cut? You want to see what I did? No you have it on your pants. That was the whole point. Oh. Oh you're filming me? Hi dork. A big problem area last winter was right here. Pull this out of the way. This is where our water hose the heated water hose comes up and it connects right here. Right behind this is like a distribution block that sends water. There's pex hoses like a spider web that go all throughout the trailer send water everywhere right? Well last year right there because a lot of water sits still right there if you're not using certain appliances and whatnot a lot of stuff froze and I did have insulation in here and a bunch of other stuff going on but it wasn't enough it froze up a bunch right there so I had a thought right over here so our heater is right here mind this failed attempt at screens for it but over here is our heater and there is some ducting let me see if I can pull this out and I'm gonna take the camera there is some ducting right here that comes from the heater that's right on the other side of this wall now this ducting normally feeds our living room that is right above this but what I did is I added a 90 up into that ducting and then I drilled a hole through this wall which you want to see what it does now when the heater runs inside if it's uh just keep going if the heater's running inside which it will be all winter all winter the heater runs not constantly but enough yeah we gotta go in here that 90 is it gonna be oh wow you can't see so that 90 catches hot air from that ducting that feeds the heater in the living room and will throw hot air into this cubby now and I've felt it while it's on and it actually is quite a bit of hot air that comes in here so this will all be heated I still plan on adding some more insulation right here maybe to like box this whole area in as you can see we got some stuff uh blocked off this and all of these guys down here feed our pump that would be for like if we were boondocking and then on top of that right up top I have those blocked off that would have been our outdoor shower which is now blocked off because that froze last winter as well due to being plastic whole area is getting heat now as long as the interior heat is running again last winter we did run heaters underneath the trailer well explain what heater I'm pretty sure if you guys were here for the last we ran like a milk crate heater some like shitty it was enough to make us feel good but it wasn't doing anything I upgraded I got us some dewalt heaters now these are like the smallest I don't know if you want to call them industrial heaters that they make that are electrical but um they do make way bigger ones than this but here's my thought the trailer runs off of the 50 amp post on the pole and the 30 amp is still available so what I did is I went on Amazon and I got us the 30 amp plug that takes it to a regular 110 plug like wall plug which is what these run off of during the winter we had a lot of problems with uh if the coffee maker went off because I was running the heater underneath the trailer off of the camper which you can show them where it was running off of that plug that's right there on the wall which that is only powering our water hose now um it would pop the breaker so this is a separate from the trailer completely different breaker should not pop but I can run both heaters now off of this and plug them in and these will produce a lot more heat and they're also temperature controlled which is really cool so we can set a temperature underneath the skirting we don't need it to be 70 degrees we're probably just going to put it at 45 40 degrees run a temperature of 23 degrees at the low to 95 at the high which is so I would stick it probably at a quarter of the way up and that should be above freezing and they'll run under there there's going to be two of them I got another one here I plan on putting one at the back of the trailer and another one at the front of the trailer kind of point them at each other and they should do their thing I know everybody says diesel diesel diesel but one thing is we don't want to have to be going to the gas station refilling up a diesel can and also filling up a diesel heater constantly when it's negative 40 degrees I talked to a guy who lived down the street from us here he ran a diesel heater last year he said he was filling up his heater with diesel once if not twice a day at least once a day I don't want to do that you don't want to do that electric is the way to go this if your park doesn't I mean depends on you have to weigh it out what you can do this was 16 on amazon 16 bucks I mean it works so the question is did we survive the polar vortex and the answer is yes we had no problems everything worked out great obviously the preparations we did in October are definitely helping out this time around we do not have frost on our walls like we did last year and we also did not lose water once we have not had one single water issue we never lost water we just dripped it the entire time and everything was perfect I'll do probably another video on the next cold spell and show you guys how we're doing the week and I'll do like an actual vlog style so you guys can see what it's like but outside of that winter has been pretty easy on us this year and we're super excited about that if you guys like this video hit the subscribe button I'll be posting more content coming up here soon especially since February is supposed to be one of the harder months who knows what will happen so stay tuned and thank you so much for watching