What Winterizing A Camper for the First Time Taught Me About Success

One thing almost everybody has in common at the end of camp season is the task of winterizing their camper. Today I'll share with you what winterizing a camper for the first time taught me about success. And then how to actually winterize a camper in lay woman’s terms.

I used to be the kind of woman that wouldn’t hang pictures on the wall because it was easier to get someone to do it for me than to do it myself. That logic stole a lot of power away from me, and put it into the hands of someone else, which was very contradictory to the amount of value I place in independence.

What Winterizing a Camper For the First Time Taught Me About Success

1.) Whenever you do anything for the first time, it’s going to take a long time. Arm yourself with patience to learn new words, figure out how tools work, and troubleshoot when nothing goes the way it should.

2.) It’s going to be harder than you thought. Nothing comes apart easily, nothing is easy to find, and nothing flows. Accepting this and doing it anyway is what separates success from failure. Some schools of thought tell you that the things you’re naturally gifted at will come easy. That’s bull shit. 

3.) You must trust yourself enough to know you will figure it out even when you don’t have a clue what you’re doing. You’ll want to quit, cry, ask for help, and give up. Don’t take the easy way out. You CAN do it

4.) Even after you’ve given up on finding the thing you’re looking for, keep looking. There is a water pump switch in there somewhere. There is a slide in switch in there somewhere. You WILL find it.

5.) The feeling of seeing pink antifreeze flow out of your taps never gets old. The glory of a visual success indicator can make you feel like a rock star. The more effort it takes to figure something out, the better it feels when you do.

6.) The feeling of watching and hearing your slide out slide in never gets old. The satisfaction of pressing a button and having it work after numerous failed attempts is second to none. Your slide out DOES work. 

7.) Don’t let your frustration level reach 11. It inevitably will, and you’ll want to use more brute force. Asserting more force to do something the wrong way usually ends up making things worse than better. Take a break, allow your vitals to return to normal, and you will see things differently after your head and rage have cleared. 

If you actually are winterizing a camper for the first time, here’s a How To Guide. 

How to Winterize a Camper For the First Time

Step One: Drain your grey and black water tanks.

Step Two: Tun off the electrical breaker or propane supply to your hot water tank. If you’re powered on, and there’s no water in your tank, there’s a good chance you’ll burn the elements out, deeming the tank useless. 

Step Three: The day after you’ve disconnected the power supply, the water will be cool enough to prevent a burn when you remove the water from the hot water tank. The hot water tank has a threaded plug in it that needs to be removed with a ratchet, vice grips, or perhaps an impact wrench. 

What they don’t tell you when you start using tools is that there are many different tools that essentially do the same job. If your new to tools, build in extra time to borrow or buy an extension for your ratchet, or the right size of socket, etc. ideally from someone that knows what they’re doing.

Step Four:  Disconnect the hose from the water supply tap and the camper. After a season of water use, loosening the connection where the hose meets the water inlet is always tricky.

I find myself asking questions like - Does the inlet thread turn left or does the hose turn left? If you can’t loosen the connection with bare or gloved hands, put one vice grips on the hose and a second vice grips on the the water inlet. Turn them in opposite directions till you get movement. If you don’t get movement, introduce WD-40 into the equation. Spray it where the hose threads meet the camper threads. You can never use too much WD-40.

Note: If you squeeze your vice grips too tight on the hose or camper inlet, you’ll morph the circular attachments into the shape of an oval, and then neither will thread into anything. Speaking from experience.

I usually have to walk away from this step at least once

Which brings me to my next point. Don’t let your frustration level reach 11. You may become too assertive, too aggressive, too forceful, and lose all sense of reason. Don’t use brute force doing the same thing hoping for a different result. It won’t work. Walk away for at least 15 minutes when your frustration level is about 8. Taking the extra time to clear your head and restore your vitals to normal can save you a lot of time and money. 

Step Five: In some campers, there may be a hot water bypass valve.  What the hell is this, you ask? I don’t understand any of the language, you say. Keep going anyway. You’ll figure it out.

To bypass the hot water tank, you want to close the valve on the cold water input and the hot water output, and open the valve on the short pipe running between them. The purpose of bypassing the hot water tank is to save you a shitton of antifreeze. If you don’t bypass it, then you may fill the entire hot water tank with antifreeze, which isn’t a huge problem, just a huge amount of antifreeze. If you don’t have a bypass valve, turn the cold water supply valve into the tank, off.

The first few years I did this, I didn’t have basic plumbing knowledge. Basic plumbing knowledge, in this case, is that the direction of the valve handle is the direction water flows. And valve is a fancy name for tap handle.

Step Six: Find the water pump. It could be under the sink, under the booth chairs, or under the bed, or somewhere else. The water pump gets the antifreeze out of the jug and into the waterlines. 

Some pumps require you attach a hose to them. A hose can be attached with a threading, snapping, or sliding mechanism. Keep working at it and/or watching YouTube videos to figure it out. There could be an on/off switch on the water pump itself, in addition to the switch that’s on the wall somewhere in the camper, that also needs to be turned on. 

Know that there IS a water pump switch somewhere in your camper. Keep looking till you find it. It’s a switch used so infrequently when you’re connected to a water supply, that when you  find it leaves you feeling like a rock star. 

Turn the kitchen or bathroom tap on. Nothing should be coming out of it at this time. 

Depending on the lay out of your camper and the length of the hose attached to your water pump, you may have to tilt the antifreeze container on it’s side. When you do this, the antifreeze might tip over. It’s nice to have a towel on hand in case this happens.

Turn the water pump switch on. Water should start flowing out of your kitchen tap, and then antifreeze. Turn the tap off after it flows pink for a couple seconds. Turn the hot water tap on. Water should start flowing out of the hot water kitchen tap, and then antifreeze. Turn the tap off after it flows pink for a couple seconds.

Repeat for your bathroom hot and cold water taps. Your shower hot and cold water taps, and your shower line. Turn the shower on while the hot and cold water taps are on to ensure you don’t have any water left in there either. 

Finally, flush your toilet until the water turns to antifreeze too. 

When you get close to the bottom of the antifreeze container, if more than one container of antifreeze is required, you’ll have to change the empty one out for a full one. This can also result in antifreeze spillage. Have towel nearby.

Step Seven: The final stage to winterizing your camper is to put the slide out in. Depending where you are, you might need to get on the roof of your camper and sweep the leaves off of the slide out. You don’t want a bunch of leaves and sticks stuck between your slide out and your camper over the winter. Plus, it might not slide in if there are too many leaves and twigs in the way.

Some campers require the battery and electrical power to pull the slide out in. You may have black, red, white, and green wires coming from your camper that need to be connected to the battery.

General rule is red to positive, black to negative. I have 2 campers with white wires, and the white goes to negative on one and positive on the other. I’ve made sparks, but I’ve never been shocked. I’ve messed up the connections multiple times. My campers, my batteries, and my body is still here, so don’t be scared of it. It’s optimum to know exactly how to do things, but it’s rarely the reality. Especially when you’re doing it for the first time.

When you do figure it out, take a picture of the correct set up, and make notes. Now, go in your camper, and find the slide in switch with the equal amount of treasure hunting skills you found the water pump switch in and press SLIDE IN.  The feeling of watching your slide out slide in successfully never gets old.