Winter camping - any advice?

1) cheap 'garden hose' material is used to bring water from the tank to the pump and thereafter.   This hose needs to be replaced by PEX or a much more reliable pipe material.  If this hose freezes, it will crack horribly, whereas PEX is much more reliable.  I easily substituted to PEX and added pipe insulation to the outside as well as spray foam insulation to the adapter to the tank.  

2) in order to rout the cold and hot water from the 'driver' side of the RPOD to the shower, they actually embedded a plastic channel box in the extruded styrofoam that forms the bottom of the RPOD.   This is a horrible idea; in doing so, they removed what was excellent insulation in the styrofoam and put the cold/hot water pipes right in contact with the bottom layer of fiberglass.  This is why everyone reports the bathroom/toilet not working in the winter.  It is fairly easy to disable these floor pipes and instead install pex piping routed through the storage area.  

  

3) Huge floor openings for the tank connections.  Grab cans of foam insulation and apply tons of it to these poorly insulated openings.  Everywhere they cut the flooring styrofoam, fill it with the foam.   

4) single pane windows.  I am sure that was to save money but the single pane will be a horrible heat loss factor in the deep cold and it will make the furnace run nonstop.   It would add so very little to the design by making them dual pane, hard to believe that savings was that significant.   This can be solved with the reflective silver insulation plaques, but this will make the Rpod dark and cavernous. I don't think there is a way around this one.

5) Have 3 gallons of RV antifreeze in both the gray/black tanks.  This will help greatly in keeping the tanks from freezing.

6) Fresh water tank:  in order for this tank not to freeze, you will need a tank heater attached to a thermostat, many on the market.   For the 36 gallons, you need about a 50-60W pad heater, which means it will draw about 4-5 amps from your battery.   I have dual 100 A-h batteries in the RPOD.  I need to run some tests but this should mean that the batteries should be able to go a whole day or perhaps two without needing to be recharged.   Probably best to assume that the RV batteries will be recharged daily for 2 hr with the generator.  My solar kit can get about 5A in the winter sun, but once it is cloudy -very often in the eastern mountains- it drops to below 1A, so very unreliable way to recharge in the ski mountain.