fundamentals- trailer insulation

FRIDAY FUNDAMENTALS-TRAILER INSULATION


Before you get all huffy and stick your nose up in the air and proclaim that your feces cannot possible have any attached odor and you are a special person since you’ve sodomized the citizenry long enough to make really good wages and you won’t ever live in anything less than a McMansion and even if you wanted to your ball and chain won’t let you because she wears the testicles in the family, think about it for a few minutes. I’m sure very few people in the last Depression thought they would be reduced to living in tents, vehicles or any other form of shelter below their accepted income level ( I’m not sure that travel trailers had been introduced just yet eighty years ago ). But stuff happens. Events push you along whether you want to go along or not. It just might happen that you end up living in a travel trailer or an immobile passenger vehicle. If you do, come the first winter you will have wished you paid attention when I told you how to add extra insulation to that tin box. Elko might not be the coldest part of the lower 48, but it can get close to that way on occasion. I’ve gone through three winters here ( well, the third ain’t done but it is running out of steam ) and lived in a trailer with varying degrees of insulation. Added insulation will make a huge difference in how cold you get, and it doesn’t have to cost that much.

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At an absolute minimum, spend $120 to skirt your trailer and add window coverings. I put off skirting for two winters. Not because I didn’t think it was a good idea but because I was trying to think how to do it cheaper. It makes a huge difference. Without skirting, the outside can be in the twenties, sun out, and you are miserably cold. Your feet can’t warm up and so you stay cold. With skirting, it can be sunny and in the teens and you are at a comfortable 50 inside without the heater. You still need to wear a couple pairs of wool socks, but then the floor doesn’t feel cold. Before skirting I had three pairs of socks on in my Sorrel snow boots and I was still miserable. The important part is to lower your trailer. Take off the wheels and lower on to concrete blocks. Now you only have to have skirting one foot high instead of two foot. You’ve just halved your skirting cost. It used to be cheap to skirt with metal roofing sheets. But since oil got expensive combined with the Chinese city building mania plus the fact that our ore deposits are depleted and take more energy to extract ( plus we ship our scrap overseas rather than use that ), metal is no longer cheap. I took rigid board insulation and cut down the middle the long way. I dug a shallow trench under the trailer siding and slipped the top of the sheet up under the lip of the trailer ( the sides come down past the floor to form a lip ) and the bottom in the trench. I put heavy bulky junk items behind and under the trailer. Thus, the item behind the trench helped keep the sheet from falling inward and pressed the top up against the inside lip. Fill in the trench and cover the boards to keep them from degrading in ultraviolet rays. I first covered with mud, and then after too many rain storms with aluminum foil held on by Elmer’s glue ( cheap to fix/replace ). You can paint but it won’t be cheap and it has to be latex or the paint itself damages the boards.

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You now have insulted skirting. On my 32 foot trailer I used under a $100 in boards ( and if I’m recalling correctly it was probably only $80 ) at about ten bucks each. I didn’t skirt the overhang ( it’s a fifth wheel ) but that has always been a lot better at keeping out the cold. Next, cover all your windows. I use the foil covered bubble wrap that comes in twenty foot long rolls for about $22 each. It is a bit beat up now but I’ve used them almost two years now, uncovering almost daily. It keeps the warm in or the warm out in summer. Over the wrap I hang used thick blankets I got from the thrift store for a few bucks each. The blankets are hung from the board that stands in front of the original curtain rods and secured by a 99 cent spring clip on each end and the middle. They look like a huge clothes pin made of metal and have rubber covered tips and handle. They are at Home Depot right across from the WD-40 I believe. Now, the next step can be to cover your walls and ceiling. This will cost extra. I did it all at once, but I’m wondering if I even needed to. Perhaps the windows and skirting are what makes all the difference. I don’t know. I had rolls and rolls of the squishy foam pads I had trash picked over several years ( and left out in the van in the cold to kill anything alive on them ). So it didn’t cost me anything but staples for half the walls. On the shallow cupboards and behind the stove as well as all the ceiling I used bubble wrap sheets. I couldn’t have opened the upwards swinging cupboard doors if the foam had been there. Or if I had opted to used rigid board insulation. All in all, even with the free foam pads, it cost me $300 for the inside insulation, windows included. A hundred at the thrift store for blankets, $140 for the foil bubble wrap and $80 for a few sheets of new squishy foam I needed for the gaps.

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I don’t know if the foam is a great idea. In a few spots it collects condensation like a sponge. But only a few spots, and most of it was free. I didn’t want to tear out the walls and put up conventional insulation. Yes, it would have been more effective, but it would have cost more and I would have lived in a construction zone for a long time. This way it was only a weekend project. And really cheap to double the value of the original insulation. Oh, and make sure to NOT cover a few air intakes if you are using a heater inside. Or, cover it all tightly and have a pipe for air intake up to the heater.

END-guest article posted earlier this morning.  Scroll down.

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