Hey y’all! It’s January, and in many parts of the country it’s cold and snowy. Currently, we’re camping an extra day in New Mexico due to yesterday’s winter storm warning in northwest NM and today’s snow and high winds east of Albuquerque. Today’s snow day has me reflecting on how we stay warm and cozy in freezing temperatures when we have full hookups and even when we don’t!

Winter camping with access to full hookups

Our preferred way to camp in freezing temperatures is with full hookups. Campsites with full hookups offer power, water, and sewer. Some places in the winter have heated water spigots so you can plug in a heated hose to ensure your water doesn’t freeze. If you don’t have a heated hose or a heated spigot, many campgrounds advise you to unhook your water connection by sundown to prevent freezing water and damage to your hose.

We have a heated water hose from Amazon that works well for our needs! The hose we bought is 25ft long. We haven’t had any more issues with freezing water after we started using a heated hose, so this is a must have in our eyes.

If we’re hooked up to power, we use our tank heaters to keep our tanks warm and safe! We also have a fully insulated and enclosed underbelly. Our floors are not immune to getting cold, so we sometimes run the propane heater to warm up the floors. We usually keep the propane heater thermostat set pretty low because my husband and I like the cold. We’d rather add on layers and blankets than be sweating!

Besides the propane heater, we also have an electric fireplace. This is our main source of heat when we’re hooked up to power. Just a few minutes with this thing on, and the whole camper is nice and toasty! Plus I really enjoy the flames. In the bedroom we have a small space heater that we turn on sometimes to take the chill out of the air when getting up in the morning.

(The towel is the Chonky boy’s towel. He liked to lay on the mat in front of the sink but would get mad if we stepped around him while cooking, so a sacrificial towel was placed by the fireplace. Now he sits there during the day)

Winter dry camping

We had our first dry camping experience in this rig earlier in the week! The outside temperatures were in the 20s, so cold but not below zero. We were camping in a Walmart parking lot in Texas, so we had room to push the slides out and run the generator if needed. Without power hookups, we set the propane heater to kick on if it got too cold and we didn’t use the fireplace. We kicked on the space heater for a few minutes to take the chill out of the air. Our power set up allows for us to kick on the space heater or fireplace, but both draw around 1200-1500 watts so we wouldn’t want to use them for too long.

As far as water went, we didn’t turn the tank heaters on because we didn’t want to deplete our house batteries during the night. Since our underbelly is fully enclosed, we determined it would be fine to leave the tank heaters off. And it was fine! No water issues. Had we been camping in sub-zero degree temperatures, we would have ran the tank heaters and used the generator to charge up the house batteries.