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How to dewinterize your waterlines in your RV
May 01, 2016
Start by filling your fresh water tank. You’re going to need plenty of fresh water to flush through the lines or hookup to City water.
To take the stale tank or sweet antifreeze taste out of the lines, you can add a bottle of Tank Fresh when you’re filling up the fresh water tank. You add one cup to ever 30 gallons. Follow the instructions on the bottle to flush the product through your waterlines.
Next, access your water pump to make sure all plumbing connections are tight, then turn it on and watch closely for leaks. Have a flash light handy to check in some of the darker hidden areas. Turn the pump off.
When you are ready to start flushing the antifreeze out of the system, turn the pump back on. Run each hot and cold tap, and also the shower, outside shower and toilet, until there’s no more pink stuff and the water runs clear. As you run the taps, keep checking back on the pump area to ensure there aren’t any water leaks.
Fill up your RV water heater
When the water runs clear, you’ll want to fill up your hot water heater again. If your heater has a bypass kit, put it back into the regular position. Important: you should only switch the bypass if you've already run all the hot water taps until they’re clear. You don't want to fill up your hot water tank with antifreeze after all the trouble you went to bypass it.
Install the plug back into your water heater, and then run your hot tap in your kitchen for about 5 minutes. It'll spit and make funny noises, but that's just because the waterline is busy filling up your hot water tank. Your tank is likely 6 gallons and that takes time to fill up. Once it's stopped spitting and you have a steady flow of water the hot water tank should be full.
Flush the city water hookup
Hook your RV up to city water and run all the taps. But watch out. When a unit sits unused all winter, the seals in the check valve can dry out or become unseated due to dirt or blockage. If water shoots out of the city water hookup when you turn on the pump, then you have an unseated check valve. Take the screen off the hookup, and push on the check valve – you may get lucky and it’ll reseat itself. If not, the check valve will need to be replaced.
All in all, de-winterizing is easy to do. It just takes some time, but worth the time.
Make sure that you de-winterize once the temperature is safely above freezing, or your in for a world of burst pipes, not the way you want to spend your camping months.
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