Motorhome Storage

Hi, yes it may affect your insurance as you will probably get a discount.  Not all insurers like a storage yard but if its Casoa Gold those that do will discount, we use Safeguard and they are good with it.

A solar panel is not essential for storage but will obviously help especially with a split charge relay to charge the engine battery as well, you may be able to use a suitcase type one but a fixed one will not only help in storage but also when travelling and allow you to go "off grid" especially if backed up with refillable gas.

In winter we take all clothing etc out but leave everything else in, in summer we leave clothes, towels, bed made up so its more ready to go.  We either bring it home a day or 2 before to get fridge cold if its a long trip and to load it but for short trips we either pop up the day before and turn fridge on gas or just take food in a cold bag until the fridge cools down.

Like you we drain water down between trips to stop it going stale but only drain the boiler in winter, our storage facility has washing bays, EHU, waste dump (black & grey) as well as fresh water so getting the same would make your life easier, we leave the car in the MH pitch when we go away.

Hope this helps...

As MichaelT indicated - a Solar panel and B2B device would allow you to leave the MH for a considerable time before needing to worry about the batteries.

A large Solar panel, two leisure batteries, a B2B and a refillable Gas system and the World, quite literally, is your lobster.

We removed most valuables (Camera and dash camera, wine and Brandy bottles) and MH relevant paper work (MOTT pass, vehicle and travel insurance, etc) but when the MH is behind sturdy fencing and CCTV covered entrance gates it should be fine – ours was.

Until recently we kept our motorhome about 20 minutes away on a smallholding. Two problems, one, the ground is rather soft and following heavy rain we twice got stuck. Second, we changed insurer and save £200 but the storage location doesn’t meet the insurers requirements of fully fenced and permanently locked.

All the insurers that I spoke to would not allow two addresses (storage location and home) but were OK with temporary storage at home prior to trips etc. The annual fee is about £220 so quite cheap therefore we are hanging on to it for now but have no long term solution.

A solar panel will keep the batteries topped up but it is recommended to take the motorhome for a run roughly once per month. Don’t know how important this is.

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We store ours on CASSO gold site in Essex,  in fact we move to a different site tomorrow. Fees are not the same as Hitchglitch says more like £600 pa. Site we are going to offers washing facilities, ehu at the washing facilities so a good vac can be carried out should we wish, as well as black and grey waste. The last 3 not being on our current storage. They also offer 24 hour access without prior notification.

I'm sure a Google search will bring up sites and then you can check availability access with each site. We were advised there would be about 6 weeks wait, it wasn' that long when we were notified there was space, we were invited to inspect the site and actual storage location with them and once we'd paid in full the spot was ours from tomorrow.

Yes we do save a little on insurance and should anyone be watching only our car is ever missing from our drive 😉

Edit we do have a solar panel which does habitation and vehicle battery and are often away for months during the winter when our motorhome is in storage and it' always started first time, even after this year's beast from the east, which we missed 😃, for the last 10 years except when the vehicle battery was too tired 😉 and needed replacing.

We drain fresh and waste water tanks but only drain water heater over the winter. We too keep it ready for action needing to only take over fridge contents and clothes. Any bedding or towels etc that we use in it that we've bought home for washing is stored in a certain wardrobe along with folding crates to take bits over in and use whilst away. A laundry bag for linen and clothing is emptied on arrival at the motorhome or destination and dirty stuff brought home in it at the end of a trip. Having never stored at home we devised a foolproof 😉 system very quickly. (Don't mention body warmers 😂😂they were overlooked for our last trip - I blame the sun 😂)

Thanks everyone for the advice and information - really helpful. I’ve time to research sites and look around, unless the timescale for introduction changes....  There do not seem to be any concessions for motorhomes proposed, and already the “sunset period” for residents  to have 2 years after implementation to upgrade their vehicles has been withdrawn.