Thread: Camping
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Old 09-02-2018, 06:18 AM   #363
glatt
 
Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: Arlington, VA
Posts: 27,717
Sent from your tent!

Awesome that you slept well.


You ask a simple question, but the answer is more complicated. Nobody wants the inner walls of their tent to get wet, but it sometimes happens.

You get two kinds of wet in a tent. Rain getting in and condensation. In your situation last night it was probably the rain. Your rainfly, if I recall correctly, doesn't cover your entire tent. The parts of your tent that are exposed will get wet in the rain, and if the rain is long enough, the water soaks into the fabric wicks its way into the inside and beads up. A good design of a tent will have a rainfly that covers the entire tent, but is some distance away from the tent, so when the water soaks into the rainfly and beads up on the underside, it doesn't touch the inner tent to get it wet.

Condensation is usually a bigger problem. It's almost always warmer and more humid inside a tent than outside the tent. It's most pronounced in cooler weather, but can happen on a hot summer night too. Moisture from your breath collects on the inside of the tent and condenses there where it meets the slightly cooler temperature from the outside.

The ideal way to avoid condensation is to have lots of ventilation. Not ideal on a cold night. Again, the best tents for fighting moisture have a nice big rainfly that stands off the tent by several inches. The fly will get wet from rain or condensation, but the inner tent stays dry. Helps if the inner tent has a lot of screening.

I have a Slumberjack Trail 3 that is rellly good at keeping me dry in rain and condensation situations. But it's a heavy 8 pounds. Not too expensive at around $110.
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