Ahhhh! Warmth! Winter (or Shoulder Season) Camping in Your Pleasure-Way: Part 1
Written By: Cary Alburn
When I purchased my 2018 Pleasure-Way Ascent in October 2017, I knew that it wasn’t a 4-season camper, but I also knew that I’d be camping in the “shoulder seasons”, Fall and Spring, and occasionally in the Winter, so very soon I began to make modifications to make it more comfortable in cooler weather. This Part 1 article won’t begin to cover everything I did, but there’s more to come!
One of the first things I did was to add Truma’s winter kit to my Truma AquaGo Comfort Plus water heater. The kit costs about $200; it consists of a heater element in a tube that substitutes for the filter and a “blocker” that covers the exhaust of the water heater to keep the cold out. It takes about 5 minutes to install and another 5 minutes to make the wiring neater with wire ties. The benefit is that if the ambient temperature is below freezing, you simply install the “blocker” (a 15 second process), turn on the Truma outside rocker switch, and turn the inner Truma control to “winter”. That starts the internal water pump and turns on the heater element, to keep the water within the Truma warm to prevent freezing while driving, thus protecting one of the most expensive appliances in your Pleasure-Way. So simple, yet so effective.
I bought my Truma winter kit at a Truma authorized repair shop, but it’s available on Amazon.
My Ascent and all Pleasure-Way’s from the mid 2010’s until PW started installing the Truma VarioHeat furnace are heated with the Atwood forced air furnace. It’s a little noisy, but it’s a lot effective in warming the coach, with its 16,000 Btu output. But unless you leave the bathroom door open, the bathroom temperature can seem more like the outside ambient temperature, especially if you have an openable window and open it for ventilation. There’s nothing quite like sitting on a cold toilet seat, to instantly wake you up!
So, one of my favorite cool weather modifications is a heat duct from the Atwood furnace to the bathroom. It has worked so well that actually measuring the interior temperature of the bathroom, it matches within a couple degrees the temperature of the rest of the coach, even in below freezing weather.
Because it’s designed to adapt to many installations, the sides of the Atwood furnace have large knockout panels, about 4” in diameter, which are a little difficult to remove, but doable with a little effort without dismantling anything. The side that faces forward toward the front of the coach is accessible through the area behind the Truma water heater, where the valves are located. Atwood sells a 2” adapter, which is designed to easily fit in the 4” opening of the furnace when the knockout panel has been removed.
Then it’s a straight shot across behind the water heater to the bathroom wall. This next step takes courage! A 2” hole must be cut in the bathroom wall for the heat outlet. OH MY!!! Like all holes to be drilled in any of the cabinetry, this is one that I measured and measured and measured before finally getting the courage to start the drill. I bought a relatively inexpensive 2” hole saw, because I doubted, I’d ever drill another 2” hole in anything else. Perhaps a better hole saw would have been a good investment, because by the time I got through the heavy wall paneling (about 1 ½” thick, because of two layers, the bathroom wall and the lower cabinet wall, my hole saw had seen better days. But the results were excellent.
I terminated the outlet with an adjustable outlet, which can both pivot to direct the heat and be closed off if I want to. I sourced it from a marine supply house in Seattle—sorry, I can’t recall its name—but many other outlets would likely work. Like any other bathroom addition, I sealed the outlet to the wall with silicon bathroom caulk.
The Atwood adapter and the insulated tubing were from Amazon. I bought the furnace tape at Home Depot that I used to seal the adapter to the furnace, the tubing to the adapter, and the tubing to the outlet.
When I first ran the tubing, it was parallel to the floor of the coach, slightly angled downward toward the furnace. Although that worked fine, I had visions of water from showering getting into the outlet and draining into the furnace if I didn’t remember to close it, so I raised the tubing a little, so that any water that got into it would drain back into the bathroom. In reality, that’s been unnecessary, because as many times as I’ve showered in there in the last 6 years, I can count on one hand the number of times I have remembered to close the outlet, but no water has ever gotten in there.
Both of these modifications, the winter kit for the Truma water heater and the bathroom heat vent, have made Winter and Shoulder Season camping more comfortable. Part 2 will delve into more cool weather modifications.
*** Before doing any modifications, please refer to the Pleasure-Way manual specific to your model.***