Tuesday

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Waking at three a.m. to to to the bathroom is not unusual. What is a whole lot less common is not having water to flush the stool. Checking Weatherbug and confirming my suspicion that the water line had frozen. It had dropped down to 27° overnight and had only warmed to 30°. 30° is still below freezing for water.
Now I knew that it wasn’t the hydrant, because that is well insulated. I also knew it wasn’t the supply hose between the hydrant and the trailer, because it is heated.
Having eliminated these possibilities left me with the chilling (pun intended) knowledge that the plastic pipes inside the trailer had ice in them. Not good! Not good at all! It is so much easier for plastic pipes to break when frozen.
The good news is that newer RVs use a flexible hose rather that plastic pipes. The bad news is, ours is not a newer RV.
There are several things that I could have done to prevent ice in the pipes.
1. Let the faucet drip. Moving water doesn’t freeze as quickly.
2. Leave the lower cabinets open. Unlike household pumping, RV pipes are mostly above the floor and run through the cabinets.
3. Aimed a heat source into those cabinets through which pipes run.
Unfortunately I had done none of those. So, at 3 o’clock this morning I did all three of these things. Before long the water was flowing and I flushed the stool. Then back to my nice warm bed I went.

When I re-awoke at 7:30 it had warmed all the way up to freezing. And better news, there is no more freezing temps predicted during the next ten days.
It was a very quite day on the Santa set. There were a few visits to talk to Santa and fewer still that had photos taken. Not profitable for the photography company. I don’t know where their break even point is, but I’d wager they didn’t hit it today.