5 Ways to Keep the RV Warm in the Winter
**This post contains affiliate links. Affiliate links do not cost you any additional money to use, but they do help support our business by providing us a commission for directing you to Amazon. If you use our links, thank you.**I feel like we are doing this RV thing all backward. We have spent more time this year in snow and freezing temperatures than we have in warmth and sunshine. We have not been doing this on purpose, as I despise being cold, but you have to go where the jobs are. It has just been our luck that all of the jobs have been in cold weather.
Since we are living our lives on a budget, we do not want to just waste our money running an endless number of space heaters in an attempt to stay warm, and it is probably not the best option with a toddler running around touching everything. With his safety in mind and our southern blood to keep warm, we began trying every trick I found online to keep the warmth inside of our RV and the cold outside.
I am going to share with you a few ways we keep our RV warm inside when the temperatures outside drop below freezing.
1. Cover your windows.
If you thought old house windows were drafty, you have never stood next to an RV window in the wintertime. We actually had ice form on the inside of our windows where the cold air seeps through. If you do no other tip from this list, you should at least insulate your windows. We completed this by adding reflective bubble insulation, commonly referred to as reflectix, to our windows.
If you have not heard of reflectix, it is a foil bubble wrap material, similar to the sunshades for car windows. You can purchase the reflectix in large rolls at home depot, as we did, or on Amazon.
However, learn from our mistake and do not tape the reflectix to the window. If you do, the condensation will build up between the reflectix and your window causing mold to build. Unfortunately, we learned this the hard way. We highly suggest you skip the tape and remove the reflectix weekly to clean behind them. If you cut the reflectix about a ¼ inch larger than you need it to be. It should just tuck into the window frame and hold it in place without any adhesive.
We are currently figuring out how to make curtains with reflectix inside of them for year-round protection from both cold and heat. Once we get it figured out, we will share a how-to with you.
2. Cover your doors.
Similar to the drafty windows in RVs, the doors do not seal very well either, and they let in a crazy amount of frigid air. You will want to protect against this. You can accomplish this by covering any doors that lead outside. We have two exiting doors in our RV. The main one in the living room area and the second one is in our bathroom for quick access when you are outside.
We chose to insulate our doors by covering them with a blanket. The blanket creates a dead air space between the door and the room. If air moves through this dead air space, it has a chance to warm up to the current room temperature before stealing all of your heat.
We covered our doors using a blanket. We accomplished this by attaching two command hooks at the top of the door and draped the blanket over them. It can be kind of cumbersome if you are going in and out often, but it still gets the job done. You could improve on this by purchasing grommets from a fabric or craft store and attaching them to the blanket to create a hole to hook on to the command hook.
Since we do not use the door in our bathroom during this time of the year, we added an extra layer of insulation to it. I did this by adding a layer of reflectix first, and then the blanket on top of it. I can tell a dramatic difference in how cold the bathroom is with and without this door covering.
If you want a more polished, decorative look to your insulation, use a heavy-duty fabric shower curtain instead. The shower curtain can be selected to match your current décor. I would hang the shower curtain in this area with the plastic-lined side (if it has it) against the door and the fabric side towards the indoor area.
We prefer to save money and use what we have, but if I can get a good deal on a heavyweight shower curtain, we will be adding it to our winter prep for next year, just in case.
3. Insulate the access to your storage bays.
A storage bay is meant for storage, not living, so chances are it has even less insulation than the rest of the RV. However, due to the low temperature of this area, the cold air will suck all the warmth from inside your RV. Insulating the storage areas can help decrease the amount of heat loss you lose.
For your storage bay areas, you can go two routes. You can use the foam insulation boards from home depot or you can use foam poster boards (from the dollar tree) with a layer of reflectix glued onto one side. The foam insulation board would probably save the most money in the long run, but if you are not planning to spend a lot of time in freezing temperatures, the foam board + reflectix combo would work in a pinch.
Whichever option you choose, you will want to cut down your boards so that they will fit snuggly up against the door opening. We can actually see our storage bay doors from inside of our RV, directly behind our bed. This means we can slide the board down into that crevice from the inside of our RV. If you are unable to get to your storage area from inside of your RV, like under the bed, you will have to rig some kind of handle to pull your board into place before you close your storage door. We actually got this idea from Fate Unbound on YouTube. They have great tips for the RV lifestyle and you should really check them out.
4. Add area rugs.
We have a toddler and a dog living in less than 200 sq ft. The struggle to keep the floors clean is real. The last thing we wanted to add to our RV was more carpet, but along with everything else in the RV, the floor is poorly insulated. The cold air makes the floor cold, which steals all the warmth you are able to create inside of your RV. Walking on cold floors will also make you feel colder and make it difficult for you to warm yourself up. Adding area rugs creates another layer of insulation for the floors, it keeps your feet from coming into contact with freezing cold flooring, and it helps to hold the heat inside. We found some cheap rugs on clearance at Walmart and they have made a big improvement in maintaining the indoor temperature of our home.
5. Add a fan.
It may sound counterintuitive to add a fan to your home when you are wanting to add warmth, but you need to circulate the air and distribute the warmth throughout your RV. Even space heaters that have a fan as part of their set up can benefit from an additional fan. Many of these heaters work using a thermostat to shut them off once the air around them reaches a certain temperature. If they are only heating the air around them and not the whole house, the heater may be shutting off prematurely. I place a fan near our space heater and direct it so that it can blow across the RV.
Living in an RV during the wintertime is not always the best decision, but it also can not always be avoided. If you are staying in a location for the duration of the winter you can add some skirting to your RV, but if you are planning on moving during the winter, a skirt can just be a hassle. Instead, use these 5 simple tips to increase the warmth in your RV and add insulation to prevent you from being cold this winter.
Stay warm and let us know in the comments if you have any other RV winter tips.
