T&T: Winterizing a boat - Poly Smell

[Ekcine]

I too had the problem of clearing out the antifreeze from my water tank in 
the spring. So I quit putting it in my tank. Instead I put a tee between the 
tank & the pump. This tee has a valve to select one or the other feed. For 
regular use you set the valve to feed the tank to the pump & all is normal. 
For winterizing, switch the tee to the other inlet and hook up a small hose 
that you run into the bottom of a jug of antifreeze. Turn on the pump and 
start opening spigots until you get pink water. Before doing this I 
disconnected the feed into the hot water tank and ran it to the output hose 
from the hot water tank creating a bypass of the hot water tank. This takes 
the tank out of the system and I just drain the tank and didn't add 
antifreeze. Don't forget to drain the water tank before winterizing the 
system. A small amount of water in the bottom of a tank won't cause any harm 
over the winter.
This system can be bought as a kit at west marine. Worked fine for me for 10 
years. Flushing the water lines of the pink stuff in the spring was 
significantly easier than flushing the whole tank.

Ed K