Seneca cold weather camping

[RVermont]

Living in Vermont and having a limited summer I am interested in extending this. I have a couple of questions

1) The Seneca's have heated tanks. It appears that these are heated by the ducting from the units heater, are the tanks located in a sealed compartment? Do those of you who winter or seasonal camp have any particular concerns or tricks to keep these tanks from freezing up? Any advise on winter camping specific to these units?

2) With salt being applied very liberally in the north we have issues with corrosion. If you use your unit in the winter months do you do anything special to reduce the negative effects of this? any particular undercoating or cleaning that you have found successful?

I have enjoyed all the comments from the various contributors and want to thank you all for you great community.

Paul

 

[Robbbyr]

Living in northeastern Ohio we also experience the phenomenon where they try to pave the roads with salt! To help my Seneca live longer I did have my unit completely undercoated by local undercoating shop. I became familiar with them because they also rustproof my department's fire trucks and ambulances to help them last. They do all kinds of larger trucks for the utility companies here and had done quite a few RVs too. They kept my unit for about a week and I am very satisfied with the job they did. Time will tell if it was a worthwhile investment!

Regarding keeping the utilities functioning in freezing weather I have had my unit out in winter a couple of times. I never had any trouble but it only got down to the mid-20's at night. You need to use the onboard furnace and not try to get by on interior space heaters if it is below freezing. No furnace - no heat down below! I have heard others who brave the elements have used supplemental electric heaters in their wet bay to assist with what the furnace sends down when the temperature is even lower. The belly compartments are not insulated, nor are the compartment doors.

When the wife retires we hope to travel even more and I plan to also supplement the belly heat like others have done. I will use electric fan-forced heaters and hardwire them in, controlled by an interior switch and regulated by adjustable thermostats. Electric draw not a concern with the 50-amp service, especially since I won't be running two AC units!

 

[anaviator]

We also took our 2015 36FK out in the winter on several occasions. We used a small electric heater in the wet bay to help keep things warm, and made sure we used the furnace for heat (rather than heat pumps or electric heaters).

The only problem we had was with the water heater - the tankless heater has freeze protection built-in (starts itself up every so often), but the lines going to and from the heater were a problem. The section that is outside the wet bay froze up on us a couple of times.

I planned to locate and insulate those lines, but we ended up trading the Seneca in on something else. When those lines froze up, no damage was done, but we couldn't get any hot water (or flow from the hot side).