How To Winterize Your Camper Van (Best Practices)

HowTo · NewVideo ·Nov 05, 2026

How To Winterize Your Camper Van (Best Practices)

Winter is coming up, which means either your van will be getting ready for a new season of outdoor adventure, or heading to storage. You'll want your van to be ready! In this guide we'll walk you through the best steps and practices towards winterizing your van, from prepping the windshield, checking tires, flushing your water system and more!

Winterizing Steps We'll Cover Today:

Interior Cleanout

- Winter is a great time to inventory everything in your van, throw away any trash, take out and put away summer items, and give it a seasonal refresh.

2. Draining the Water System

- You'll want to completely flush water out of your water system before dealing with freezing conditions, opening drain valves and running your water pump until everything clears out.

3. Checking the Espar

- If you have plans to use your van this winter, now is a good time to check that your heating system is working properly, especially if it had been some time since it was last used.

4. Removing the Water Pump (Optional)

- Some water pumps such as mine are mounted on the exterior of the van, I find it easiest to simply remove it for the winter, this task isn't necessary but an extra measure if its accessible.

5. Prepping the Windshield

- Winter means dirty, slushy roads, frozen windshields. My go to for the season is RainX to help with that, but first the windshield will need to be properly cleaned. This is also a good time to check your windshield wipers and make sure they are working properly.

6. Winter Inventory

- After clearing out our summer inventory, we should put in anything that would be useful for winter conditions: a Jumpbox, MAXXTRAX, Ice scraper, etc.

7. Best Winter Tire Solutions

- If you ran summer tires or just want more traction for the winter, we'll discuss some options for you for winter tires.

Walkthrough

Interior Cleanout

The interior cleanout process is entirely up to you, how much you want to take out or leave in, maybe your van is already perfectly clean. I usually like to leave in some good winter staples like hot chocolate and a coffee maker.

Draining the Water System

The next step will be to drain out your water system. To do this, locate your drain valves, mine are located right under my hot water heater, set all of them to open and turn on your water pump. Then go ahead and open up your faucet towards the hot water mixing valve to let air into the system. Go ahead and let this drain out for a bit.

Heater Test

Next we'll fire up our Espar or whatever heating system you have in your van. We're just going to run through, clear any codes we may have. Turn on the Espar and run it up nice and hot. With an Espar you should get a solid red ring telling you its fired up. Then we'll check our Espar exhaust outside and feel for exhaust pressure. We'll also check the vent itself and feel for the heat. If the fuel in your gas pump has evaporated, especially if you haven't used it in a long time, you'll want to head around to the fuel pump under the van, and just give it a few hits with something like a screwdriver handle to get the BBs inside moving again, you'll feel it ticking, then you're all set. Make sure you have enough fuel as the Espar works best with above a 1/4 tank of fuel.

Prepping the windshield

Having your windshield icing over or water accumulating on it from road slush is one of the most difficult things to deal with during the winter season. My preferred method for mitigating this issue is with RainX. Before applying you want to make sure you clean everything off of your windshield. To do this, I spray the glass with an ammonia free glass cleaner, the one I use is from Adam's Polishes. Then I take a non-scratch scouring pad, to scrub off any bugs or debris stuck to my windshield without scratching it. I'll go over that with more glass cleaner and a microfiber to make sure I get every last bit off. To apply the RainX, I spray it on a fresh microfiber cloth, and rub in small circles, covering 50% of the previous pass with each new one. Once I have completely covered the windshield, I'll wait 10 minutes for it to cure, and buff off the left over film before applying one more coat to finish it off.

This is also a good time to check on your windshield wipers, make sure they are in good shape, and check your wiper fluid, and make sure it can run in the winter during freezing temperatures.

Winter Inventory

A list of some of the staples I like to keep in my van for the winter

Extra water jug: since our water tanks will be empty
Ice Scraper/Snow Brush: ideally a telescoping one since parts of your van can get high and out of reach
MAXTRAX: a set of recovery boards for your van in case it gets stuck in mud or snow
Windshield squeegee: one of the less necessary things on this list, but it can be nice for cleaning up your windshield at a gas station or off the road.
Battery Jump Box: A high enough power jump box compatible to the size of your engine, even better if you can help others with it as well. I usually would keep this plugged in somewhere in the van so that it is ready to go in a pinch.

Winter Tire Solutions

Depending on what tires you run during the summer, this is a good time to make sure they are winter ready. All season tires will probably do just fine in the winter on a van, but with all of the weight on my van, I do like to run a set of dedicated winter tires as I ski often during the winter. I am currently running a set of Falken Wildpeak H/T tires, which again I'm sure will fare just fine. I am going to be throwing on a set of Bridgestone Blizzak tires this winter, which are much more capable of gripping snow or ice during the winter. Another option would be studded tires but I think these Blizzaks provide a good alternative to that.