Winter storage and central heating
Comments
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I always open all drains and taps before leaving a site, and blow out any remainder once home. It costs money to move water about the country, whether or not the caravan is motorised.
As the caravan gets used in winter as well as summer, and often suddenly if weather ahead looks good, I use an oil filled radiator, controlled by a remote thermostat, to keep the insides above freezing. I don't want to have to spend ages heating up all the contents each trip.
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We drain down for winter as we do not use the van between November and mid March, but between March and October we leave things alone (we have an Alde system), other than to drain and refill the Alde after about 4 weeks use to maintain the air cushion in the hot water system.
There is about 8l of water in the boiler plus whatever is in the pipes, and we leave a few litres in the onboard cold tank to use en route, we have plenty of payload to cover that.
There are several ways of operating depending on your situation, not all caravans have enough payload to carry water in the system.
Now it is getting chilly, we will be setting the Alde on 5 degrees just in case any water is lurking anywhere.
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For those using the caravan heating system during storage, I would like to introduce the concept known as MTBF - minimum time before failure. This is the principle that any system will eventually fail if running a lot the time.
Now, I have no idea what the MTBF for an Alde system, for example, might be, or how expensive the lightly failure point would be to replace. However, avoiding the risk of finding out the hard way is to use a different system to provide heat in storage.
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I have had the pleasure of coming across the acronym MTBF at work. I believe the usual full words are: Mean Time Between Failure.
With regard to the discussion point also worth bearing in mind that quite a lot of systems fail for lack of use.
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Mean Time Between Failure is the statistical average over many samples. Most failures occur fairly early on in the life of a component, however, it is of course true to say that the longer you use something the less life remaining. A bit like my body methinks. Time for a little snooze.
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I drain off the hot water whenever I leave a site as a matter of course...into my waste water container and not onto the ground...and leave the valve open on our homeward journey. However as our van is seldom left unoccupied for more than 3 weeks even over the winter I very rarely think of heating it up.
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I'm too mean to dump hot water, so we have got it down to a fine art to use up the hot water by switching off after morning showers. Dishwashing etc uses up the remains so only clean cold water to dump.
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On a grass pitch we run the hot water out and then dump the heater content, just to avoid risk of killing the grass with 8l of 60 degree water.
Like many ours is stored in a yard with no power, so never heated between trips, and if we had power we would probably only heat the van up every now and again.
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