Negative 31 Degrees Fahrenheit

According to the National Weather Service, my location hit negative 31 degrees Fahrenheit for the low during a cold snap. It was negative 31 for only a couple hours in the early morning, but then the highs the following day were not even above zero. The days surrounding had similar lows in the negative 24 to negative 28 degree range. Trailers in my neighborhood were flooding the streets from frozen and cracked pipes. University buildings were suffering frozen pipes. And many other houses in the town had frozen pipes. I didn’t! 

My winterizing work really got tested during this cold snap and it all turned out to be a smashing success. My remake of my heated water hose turned out to be great. It should be good down below negative 40, but hot water came out of my faucet after negative 30, so that’s a major win.

Because of the ultra-cold temps, I did drain my tanks before the snap and pour RV antifreeze into the waste tanks. The purpose of this was to keep the pipes and valves from freezing and splitting. Since the water closet compartment is heated by both the furnace and an electric heater, I wasn’t worried, but wanted to cover all bases. Whether it was necessary to add RV antifreeze, I’m not sure, but my guess is that it didn’t hurt. 

Inside the coach, I was able to keep it at 59 degrees F even during the coldest moments in the night because of the good insulation that this model has and because of my use of both a propane furnace and electric heaters to supplement the propane furnace. My electric heaters were set to their lowest setting and I only use them to spread heat and to keep the furnace from running constantly. At their lowest setting, the two electric heaters consume 725 W. That’s more energy than I would care to admit is needed, but in the grand scheme it’s a tiny amount of energy to heat a house in negative 30 degree F temperatures.  

I made it through the first major cold snap with ease. The problem is that winter had not even arrived when these temps arrived – it was still fall. So, as winter begins and then progresses, we’ll see how many more of those ultra-cold days are still in store. The condition that has me concerned is the possibility of the power going out during a major cold snap. If the power goes out, I have an emergency plan in place, but it will require me to be home for the outage and to recognize the outage in time. In double-digit negative temperatures and a power outage, my heated water hose has about 15 minutes before ice crystals will start forming in the pipe.