What are you expecting for the daytime high? Will you have electricity where you are going?
If you have electricity you should have not issues as long as the day time highs reach 40 or better.
Do you have an enclosed underbelly? Does it get heat from the furnace?? Have heating pads on your tanks? Do you have any exposed water pipes under the floor? If you have a kitchen slide out with your kitchen sink or a frig with water in it, you might, have exposed plumbing.
We cool weather camp fairly often, pretty much every spring and fall! We have an HTT, an exposed underbelly, and no tank heaters. Yet to have any issues, but I am careful and I keep an eye on things. With many years of practice, I feel fairly comfortable in cooler weather.
Last campout (5 nights, boondocking), our coolest overnight low was 22 degrees. Day time highs most days never reached 40. No issues! We have an an HTT (tent ends loose a lot a heat), and an open underbelly, no tank heaters. That trip we had no electricity, so we had to be careful running the furnace as it and my CPAP consume a lot of 12V power. In our case I recharged the battery every day via the generator, and ran the furnace intermittently throughout the day and evening. But it was off all night (lots of blankets). That trip was more of an extreme than usual for us in the cooler weather.
DW likes an electric site in the early and late season, so here is what we typically do. We use a 1500 watt electric ceramic heater as our primary heat source. Usually we turn the furnace on in the morning to warm up the HTT. Sometimes, at night if I get up to use the bathroom, I might turn on the furnace for 5-10 minutes. We keep all the cabinet doors ajar especially at night, that have plumbing running through them. This lets the heat migrate into these areas. The insulation is really poor in some areas.
We never have full hookups. So we fill our FW tank full. There is a lot of thermal mass in the water. It will take days for it to freeze. So over a few days, I don't worry. If the FW tank was getting empty, might be different story (again open underbelly).
If you have full hook ups. Disconnect your FW hose and sewer hose at night. Recommend draining the FW hose and place it in a warm(er) cargo hold, this will keep it from being super stiff when you go to reconnect in the morning. The water hose is small, and does not have the thermal mass of your FW tank, so it will freeze up over night. The Sewer hose, has a unique issue. The warm moist air in the CG sewer lines, will migrate up to your flexible hose, It will condense, freeze and create thick frost like ice inside the sewer hose. Sometimes it can freeze solid.
I wish I was camping this weekend. Our HTT, has been put to bed for the winter.
Jim Davis
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