Useful things to know when looking at tents and camping equipment.
Where do I start?? The list of bits on camping trivia and useful little facts is endless and after 20 years in the camping trade both buying and selling tents I still learn a bit more every year..
The most common thing that is talked about these days is Hydrostatic Head (hh) or how many mm of waterproofing does this tent have. Customers then get swept along that they must have the highest hh proofing available because it rains in the UK!!
Only as little as 10 years ago when buying a tent from a camping shop you would have struggled to get technical information on the waterproofing hh on a tent in fact even when I was working for a tent manufacturer it was rarely mentioned it was just taken as standard that tents were proofed by the factories.
One day one of the major tent suppliers decided to tell everyone that they applied a 2000mm level to there tents so the next year another tent supplier went one better and applied 3000mm and so on. Here's the fact though for years all tents were very rarely proofed above 1000mm and as suppliers and retailers we never had tents back for leaking through the material. The industry standard accepted minimum is now 1500mm of proofing and with this in mind don't get confused. Many manufacturers produce ranges of tents from there factories from a 1500mm level to 6000mm and we have them all erected and are confident that any we sell wont cause a problem whatever the proofing level.
The weak point for water ingress into any tent is the seams and for many year manufacturers supplied seam sealant in a bottle to close the stitching holes.
This has now progressed and all the tents that we sell now are hot air taped along the seams to cover these holes and to help prevent water ingress through the seams.
