Meet the Maker: AirSkirts are a Winter Game Changer
A new skirting solution helps unlock more winter RV destinations.
Image Caption: Photo Credit: Airskirts
AirSkirts founder Jim Phelan was bound for warmer weather when he bought a trailer and left Brooklyn almost a decade ago. At least, that’s what he anticipated. In the years to follow, his compass would routinely point back toward northern locales, where he’d wrestle with a conundrum that had vexed many RVers before him: How to properly skirt a travel trailer.
When a rig is parked and temperatures plunge, pipes and water tanks can freeze. Heat that naturally dissipates through the floor can only counteract the problem if it’s contained in the trailer’s underbelly. The goal of skirting— which has taken on creative forms over the years—is to make a warm pocket of air, increasing efficiency and preventing pipes from bursting.
Photo Credit: Airskirts
Phelan tried a few methods, including Styrofoam boards, but he was continually disappointed. “I really hated the way other people skirted trailers,” he says. “I had this beautiful Airstream and I didn’t want to drill holes in it.”
He knew trapped air was a good insulator, and at one point thought about stuffing large balloons below his trailer. Eventually, he figured he’d find durable air bags made from the same material as whitewater river rafts. “I figured this had to exist, but it didn’t,” he says. So, he had a manufacturer make samples. It wasn’t for commercial purposes, just to solve his own problem—at least at the time.
The air bags Phelan first inflated under his frame turned heads at RV parks. Before long, people asked if he could make more. “As soon as I did it,” he says, “I realized it was probably something.”
Photo Credit: AirSkirts
Something, indeed. Just as the pandemic brought an unprecedented number of travelers to the road, Phelan launched AirSkirts and made his first sale in November 2020. In year one, he fulfilled several hundred orders out of the AirSkirts headquarters in Connecticut. A year later, it was thousands. By late 2023, Phelan was approached by AllGuard, which bought his start-up company the following year.
Phelan now serves as the managing director of AllGuard’s RV business group, though he and most of the AirSkirts team still reside in Connecticut—where Phelan has learned to embrace the cold. In fact, he hopes AirSkirts will make it easier for more travelers to extend their adventures beyond the summer months. “We try to reach people who don’t go to cold weather destinations because they don’t think they can,” he says. “We want to help people camp where they couldn’t camp before.”
AirSkirts kits fit travel trailers, fifth-wheels and motorhomes. Orders are customized to vehicle dimensions. See airskirts.com for the details (and many snowy RV pics).
This article originally appeared in Wildsam magazine. For more Wildsam content, sign up for our newsletter.
