Mike says;

I think I've got to give you the consultant's answer on that one. "It depends." If you just had a light freeze (down to around 28 degrees at night, but still warming up above freezing during the day), my local Smart People tell me you'll probably be OK. I was worried about the occasional freeze while we were traveling and my local RV hero (Rob Olsen at Midwest RV in Eleva, WI) told me that's no problem. He says that things get "slushy" at night, but thaw out during the day and won't cause a problem.

But if you've had a really hard freeze things could be dire if there's still fresh water in the lines or the pump. The lines will tend to burst in the low spots where the water collects, and the pump... well... the pump will be very unhappy about having frozen water expanding in it. And running the pump while there's frozen water in it might also be a problem -- since electric motors don't like standing still with power applied to them.

It might be worth finding a friend or an RV shop with a big heated garage and letting your RV sit there for a day or two to thaw things out. Or maybe this is a great excuse to take a no-plumbing trip south where it's above freezing? "Dear Boss, sorry I can't come to work for the next few days, I have a plumbing emergency."

Here's the map I use to figure out where I need to go to get above freezing. The only tricky bit is that the time is Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which means that you have to subtract about 5-6 hours to get to your local time. I use the 12:00 time to figure out what the low temp is going to be (that equates to around 6AM local time).

http://www.intellicast.com/National/Temperature/TEMPcast.aspx

Hope things turn out OK!

I would add a pickup line at the pump "in" side of your pump. You would then drop this line into a gallon of antifreeze and pump thru your fresh water system.

After draining the water heater there is no need to add antifreeze to the water heater. The small amount of water remaining at the bottom of the water heater will not cause a problem. If you add antifreeze to the water heater it will require a "lot" of flushing in the Spring to clear it, the same as the fresh water tank.

With the above mods you'll cut the amount of antifreeze needed by a gallon or two.

Mike says;

I haven't had the tough time with flushing that you're describing. I run a few gallons of fresh water through the fresh-water tank with the hose before i close the valve and let it fill up. Then I run some water through the hot-water tank before I close the valve and let that one fill up. The rest of the "clear the antifreeze from the rest of the lines" process uses a lot of water from the fresh-water tank and by the time it's all done, it's fine.

One note -- we don't drink or cook with the water from the RV. We always carry bottled water 'cause we find that campground water is pretty erratic in terms of how it tastes. So a little anti-freeze doesn't really bug me.

Yep, adding a valve is what lots of people suggest -- but this is the lazy-man's approach. Besides, a few extra gallons of anti-freeze is lots cheaper than fixing the results of my putting that valve in wrong.

Amy S.
Grinnell '74

Mike says:

Right on!

Mike says;

Hm. That sounds like a project that needs to be seen to be understood. Can you take some pictures? Post 'em on Flickr or someplace like that?

I'm pretty new at this too, so you'd best take all this as the ravings of a newbie. Other more experienced folks may want to chime in on Carl's question here. But... I love making up stuff even when I don't know what I'm talking about, so here goes.

I figure that since I've got antifreeze running out of the faucets that i can leave the low points closed. My theory is that there's nothing but antifreeze in those lines, so might as well just leave it there. The More Complicated Traditional Approach has you fiddling with those things, sometimes going so far as to blow all the water out of the system with compressed air, sometimes opening those low-point drains, etc. etc. But I'm gonna just leave things the way they are and see how things go when we head south in January. I'll update this post if things to haywire!

I didn't quite track the "2 white 1 red low point lines" part of your post. Expand on that if you ever get back to this thread.