RV Storage: What You Need to Know this Winter

There's more to safe and secure RV storage than just winterizing it and putting it away. Among other things, you need to pay attention to the roof, tires, and electrical system.

Our guest in the Interview of the Week segment in Episode 471 of the RV podcast is our friend Todd “The Beard” Henson of the National RV Training Academy.

Todd is one of the RV industry’s top experts in maintaining and caring for your RV and the chef instructor in a special home training course that any RVer can benefit from.

You can watch the video version from our RV Lifestyle YouTube Channel by clicking the player below.

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RV INTERVIEW OF THE WEEK: What you need to know about RV Storage

Here’s an edited transcript of the interview:

The best solution for RV Storage is indoor storage

Todd:

Let's go over a lot of the considerations. I mean, we have a large investment sitting in the cold weather, and the one thing we don't want to do is just simply leave it out there in all cases, so let's look at some of the best preferences.

So number one is, if it's possible, is to store it indoors. The worst thing that we can do is leave this out in the field by itself. But I know that in some cases we've got no option. So how do we protect that investment? 

If you can't store it indoors, I would recommend storing it even outside of trees. The problem with that is that most trees, of course, they go into winterization mode as well, and that's when we get a lot of foliage that drops, and then of course we get limbs that drop. And guys, most of our roofs are either some type of rubber membrane or PVC membrane and falling objects are not desirable. So I would not recommend storing it in an open air situation.

If outside, watch out for tree damage during RV storage

Now, from there, what are some other things that we can do? 

Okay, now we know that these RVs, the tires are just sitting there. There's a couple of things that I want to look at. 

One is, of course, if you can roll them up on some wooden blocks, especially if it's going to be on concrete, go ahead and roll them up on wooden blocks. The second thing is that as the air gets cooler and there's really not much going on, the tires can deflate. 

Take care of your tires

So I'm going to ask you to look at that every once in a while because we've had several situations even with FEMA, where we would store these, and of course we had survivors (from hurricanes) living in them, but the tires would begin to actually decrease their pressure, release their pressure, however you want to say it, and the frame would move and our survivors couldn't get out of the door because the frame was on the ground.

So we want to make sure that we're keeping an eye on it. So what we want to do is just make sure that we're checking on this every once in a while, checking the pressure of our tires, but also looking around for any signs of rodents, any other type of wild animals, because they're looking for a place that's warm and they will chew their way in and get outside of the cold weather.

Now, to me, because people ask this all the time,