178 Bypass valves

I cut wood dowels to hold bed and plywood up. I use the compressed air method to winterize, works fine in TN. Yes it does take awhile. The kymooses videos on YouTube are excellent. One for air and one for antifreeze. I have a 178 and don't change my valves, limits amount of time lifting 10" mattress and plywood.

Since 2012 I have only used to compressor method to blow out my lines.  I have timed myself to go thru the process of 1)switching the 3 valves for winterization, 2) open and drain HW tank, 3) hooking up air gun to loose pigtail hose under sink to blow out lines, 4) blow out lines (takes about 1 minute going thru all cold and hot water lines and toilet 2x, 5) add a total of 8 oz. pink antifreeze to 3 traps, 6) re-install drain plug to HW tank.  Took me just under 5 minutes, not too time consuming in my estimation.  The big plus is no nasty antifreeze taste the following year in the cold water supply for your drinking water.  We often have temps that fall well below - 20C during the winter, especially in January.  Never have had any water or line leak issues using this method.

My opinion on winterizing based on my experience is that compressed air winterizing does not completely empty out all water in the system, even when one works through all faucets and low point drains. I did that, but decided to pump RV antifreeze through the system also. I was surprised at the amount of water that was expelled from the system before the pink antifreeze started flowing from the faucets.

That being said, I only needed one gallon of RV antifreeze since most of the water had been purged previously by the air. I will probably stick with this hybrid winterizing as it seemed to be relatively quick and it has so far been effective.