I bought a
Big Agnes Seedhouse SL2 tent last year. I still like it a lot, but the porch has been bugging me a bit (the end of the inner is a bit exposed when you open the door, and I'm a shortarse so opening the door can mean a face full of wet nylon if it's raining) so I wanted to experiment with adding a canopy. Also for a cooking shelter option and that.
I got an Alpkit 3.5 tarp for Christmas, but whilst I was waiting for some poles to arrive from China I also spotted a Gelert Mini Tent Canopy on sale for a fiver so I bought one of those too.
I was car camping last week so I took both along to have a bit of an experiment with.
Experiment #1: Gelert Mini Tent CanopyThese photos are from the second day after a bit of fiddling to try and reduce the gap between the sides of the tent and the walls of the canopy. I didn't manage to get it as taut as I had done the day before, but it was always a bit saggy.
Verdict: Lots of space and the shade kept my coolbag cool for aaaaages. By 'eck that pole flexes a lot in the wind, though! It's not really the right thing for the shape of the Seedhouse, but I might try it on the more rounded front of some of my bigger tents.
Experiment 2: TarpWhen the wind got really strong I thought discretion would be the better part of valour and I relocated to a different part of the campsite. I took the opportunity to ditch the Gelert canopy and try the Alpkit tarp instead.
Ahhhh! That's better!
A lot smaller than the Gelert, but a much better match.
As a Ginger I really liked the way this also gave me a shady spot to lounge around in in front of the tent. I'd only considered tents giving me shelter via the
inside before, so this was a bit of a revealation!
A bit of extra shelter from that wind, too.
It rained overnight, but the door was perfectly dry when I had to make the early o'clock wee jaunt. Brilliant!
Less brilliantly, my lie-in was rudely interrupted after the wind shifted to the front of the tent and picked up a bit. Okay, a lot. 20+mph going by the Met Office app.
The tarp got blown down and I had to go out and wrangle it into the car.
Experiment 3: Tarp at a jaunty angleI think part of the problem was that one of the poles had worked its way through the hole in the tarp. I think I need to invest in some of those little plastic top hat things (are they a thing, or did I imagine that?). Later in the day when the wind had started to swing back round towards behind the tent again, I improvised by winding masking tape around the poles beneath the tips to increase the diameter.
I then tried this rigging:
Sort of okay-ish, but the wind was still a bit too sideways on and my cheap poles were flexing a lot so I reverted to something similar to the first attempt with a lot smaller side area.
Experiment 4: Like Experiment 2, but differentIn Experiment 1, the back edge of the canopy was held in place by quite a lot of downward force. I wasn't really happy with this. For Experiment 2 I'd provided most of the backwards tension by running a line from the foot of the tent, along one side of the ridge, through the mid-edge hole in the tarp, then back down the other side of the ridge to the same peg at the foot.
Informative photo:
Arty photo:
This eliminated the sideways slightly-worrying-tending-towards-a-sawing-motion I'd noticed the wind causing with #1, but I'm still a bit worried about the potential for wear from the thicker material surrounding the hole and the rope where it goes through it.
For this variant I brought the line up and over the rear edge of the tarp to go through holes off to the side and then through a fabric loop that was along the central line but not on the edge (hope that makes sense - see the photos). This meant I could fold the tarp under itself to give a bit of protection. I then added a carrier bag too, 'cos I'm classy like that.
It looses a bit of length in the process, but I think it'd still be useful in the wet. Certainly I made use of the sun protection!
Experiment ++: Next stepsNow I sort of have an idea what guylines I might be using, I'm going to make some proper ones with some
mini line-loks I have (rather than the ones I robbed off the Gelert and some quick bodges).
I think I also want to try two separate lines coming off at the sides at the points where the line does in #4.
I'll see how that goes and then look to see if I need to add padding or a sacrificial wear layer or something where the tarp crossed the central spine. It's a bit of a faff, but I was really sold on the benefits of an awning so at this stage it still feels worth it!
Supplementary question:Does having a rope or a tarp in contact with the outer skin of the tent promote water ingress (in the same way that touching the sides of a tent from the inside would)?
It did occur to me that I could buy another two poles and just have a flat awning table-top style above the tent and not in contact with it, but that feels wrong somehow!