Looking for a Tent.

I'm looking for a one-person three season tent, and i came across this one.
The price is tempting, but I wondered why it's so cheap. Does anyone have experience with this brand, or better yet, this particular tent? If so, is it any good? If not, could you recommend a good one person tent? It needs to be compact and light enough to carry attached to my ALICE for camping trips, but tough enough to last.

Single wall construction. No fly. Doesn't look too bad but I'd be concerned about those tiny vestibules covering the door and the limited ventilation.

Nice to see it come with a compression sack for storage though.

At that price it's hard to go wrong. If it's junk you're not out a lot of money. I've owned some pretty cheap tents in my day and it's hard to go wrong with most modern tents. One of the best tents I've slept in lately is a $35 2 man from Costco.

If the tent turns out to be good...then the question of why is this tent so cheap turns into a new question. Why are all the others so expensive?!

I have something silimar that I've used once or twice. 3 season? Maybe. You might do well to check out what the ultra lighters are buying.

tro

Hi Erik_B

The tent is so cheap because it is not a 3 season tent. It is a single wall tent and you will get wet inside it. The hydrostatic head of 600mm is a single season tent. A 3 season tent will have a much higher hyrostatic head value typically greater than 3000mm. This tent is for the children to play about in, in the garden.

Some things to look for when buying a tent.

1) Get one which is slightly bigger than you think you need.
2) Make sure you can sit up in the tent straight without your head touching the inner wall fabric.
3) A double walled tent will dramatically cut down condensation and will keep you much drier.
4) A tunnel tent is lighter than a geodesic tent but is not as stable in very high winds.
5) A vestibule is extremely useful for cooking and storing your pack and dirty boots.
6) For a 3 season tent get a fabric with a hydrostatic head greater than 2000mm.
7) Good quality aluminium i.e DAC featherlite or 7000 series or Scandium poles are much stronger than glass fibre.
8) Go for a Ripstop fabric and YKK zips if possible.
9) Ensure the tent has good controllable vents i.e. lets air out and keeps rain out.
10) The investment in a good quality tent may just pay you back with your life. i.e a $200 tent may last twice as long as a $100 tent but will be lighter and stronger.

Something like the TNF Tadpole has been around for years

http://www.campmor.com/webapp/wcs/stores...mberId=12500226

My current single man is a Lightwave ZRO Cylq (not made anymore but was half price when purchased)

Avoid anything made by "Wenzel"; very low quality.

Buy it, try it, and if it isn't so great, save it for when you've got visitors with kids staying for a few days. Give them two $9 closed-cell foam mats and some bedding, a couple of cheap flashlights, help them make some S'Mores on a $5 disposable BBQ grill, and leave the back door to the house unlocked all night for bathroom runs.

When they get home, their friends will get tired about hearing of the great time they had while visiting you.

Sue

Hard as it may be to believe, Sue is right (again). Backyard campouts, nothing more. When I was doing quite a bit of backpacking, I used a Sierra Designs Flashlight . Big enough for two (if they are real good friends), plenty of room for one person and his/her gear. Mine was an older sleeve model, the clips they make now should go up even faster. Its only drawback was that water could get in if you were entering/exiting in the rain...

Fair enough; if it's cheap enough to be disposable, give it a try. But please try it in your yard, not on a multi-day trip.

Based on my experience (solo backpacking in the Canadian Rockies for a couple of decades) a single-walled, waterproof tent just about guarantees a wet, cold, miserable trip. Basically, you can duplicate the same thing with $5.00 of plastic sheeting or a bunch of oversize trash bags; just wrap them loosely around your sleeping bag.

The advice given by Am_Fear_Liath_Mor above is solid stuff. There are two kinds of moisture that a tent/shelter must manage: moisture from outside (rain, snow, dew) and moisture generated by you (moisture you expel with every breath, plus insensible perspiration from every pore in your body). A waterproof shelter keeps most of your "expelled moisture" inside the tent with you, where it condenses from vapour to water, thus killing the effectiveness of your insulation. At about four in the morning, you will wake up and realize all is not well.

The good news: it doesn't cost much to get it right. I went the budget route for about ten years, when starting out, since money was tight. The system that really worked, in 3-1/2 seasons, was a largish tarp of waterproof nylon, with a small netting enclosure inside (handmade), and a cheap woven poly tarp as a groundsheet underneath. The whole rig can be put together for about the same price, for about the same weight, and will serve you for years. Added bonus: you get to look out and see the night, which is often worth seeing.

Hope this long post is somewhat helpful. Good luck!

Inexpensive tents are great so long as the weather is great. But, if the weather turns in the middle of your trip, you will wish you were in a better constructed tent. The question is, do you feel lucky?

I will agree competely with my fellow ETSers on this one...poor quality. Save it for teh backyard. I have a Eureka Spitfire one man and I love it. Have had it out on several occasions and I find it easy to set up, light to haul and very stable.

I just found the identical tent under a different brand on the Cabellas website...the reviews don't look spectacular.

I did find this tent through. The reviews are good though it's not much more than a bivy sack with poles and a rain fly. I'm thinking about picking it up myself. It even comes with spare pole sections and a bottle of seam sealer!

(WARNING: MIDDLE-AGED REMINISCING ALERT!) My first tent (military surplus, heavy cotton canvas) was absolutely perfect, unless you had to carry it very far. Also, after a couple of seasons the waterproofing wasn't so hot. The lack of a floor also had some drawbacks, as did the lack of mesh windows. Other than that, it was perfect. I loved that tent.

Much later I got a hi-tech, nylon & no-see-um mesh, separate rain fly, waterproof tub floor, flexible-fiberglass-pole wonder. It weighs a third as much, takes half the time to set up, and has none of the drawbacks of the old one. When inside, I am as isolated from my environment as several ounces of space-age fabric can make you.

Now when going solo more often than not I carry two military ponchos, a poncho liner, a poly/mylar "blanket" with grommeted corners, and a 3' x 3' piece of fine nylon mesh. That is my sleep/shelter system. It's not perfect, and it's sure not hi-tech, but I like the simplicity, flexibility, and multi-tasking capability of the components. I also like being a little more in touch with my surroundings. I have yet to get wet (except for one time when I foolishly set up in a location where the rain water pooled during the night) and yet to sleep cold (except for the occasion just mentioned).

I guess my long-delayed point is, a tent is a tent. It has a function. The measure of its success in performing that function is probably dependent on your expectations and perceptions as much as anything else.

A couple of thoughts on the hoop tent:

I hope the fly doesn't conform too closely to the shape of the inner tent. Otherwise, I'd be worried about condensation problems. This type of design can have ventilation issues.

And given the weight, I wouldn't expect the floor of the bathtub to stay waterproof very long. Clear your sites carefully, and put something underneath to lessen abrasion (groundsheet, footprint, or even trash bags).

On the plus side, you can use the inner tent with a grounsheet underneath and a tarp pitched over top, and have a shelter that's quite light and versatile, with room to do more than just sleep.

Some of the Scouts in my son's Boy Scout troop have purchased solo backpacking tents. One of the Scouts bought the Eureka Solitaire ($70). My son has the Eureka Spitfire 1 ($100).

The limited headroom in the Eureka Solitaire drives the one Scout nuts. He can't even situp. He wishes he'd purchased the Spitfire.

The Spitfire 1 is a high quality reasonably lightweight tent at a decent price, BUT you'll probably have to stow your gear outside. My son puts it in a large plastic bag to protect it from the elements.

If you want to stow your gear inside, consider the Eureka Spitfire 2 ($140) - that is what I use since I needed more length (I'm 6'5").

Although they are single walled tents, Tarp Tents are extremely well thought out. I own the two person Double Rainbow and have had extremely good experiences with it. It is a scant more damp than my double walled tents but not so's you'd really notice. And it weighs an unexaggerated 4 pounds less!!!

http://www.tarptent.com/products.html

Your really can't compare the weight of a single-walled tent (Double Rainbow) to a double-walled tent (Spitfire 2).

In the event of a driving rain on a cool windy day, closing the single-walled Double Rainbow would result in massive condensation problems. The double-walled Spitfire 2 with a full-length fly, even with all doors closed, still has substantial ventilation through the bottom of the rain fly and the hooded fly vent at the top.

Well, all I can do is suggest you try the Double Rainbow or one of the other TarpTents. Your prediction has not been my experience. I have, actually, slept very comfortably in my Double Rainbow on "a cold windy day" without a significantly larger amount of condensation than the double wall tents I own. In fact, the worst tent I ever owned for condensation was one of those double walled tents with the full mesh top - sleeping in that tent was like sleeping in a rain forest.

Again, 4 lbs is a pretty fair trade off for a bit more condensation.

Over the last couple of years, I've been using the MSR Zoid tents.

Without the footprint and sticks, you can roll the 2.0, 1.0 and mini down to loaf of bread size, and hang the poles on the outside of your back pack.
IIRC, the Zoid 2.0 weighs in at around 3 lbs. total, and it's a generous 2 man/3 season tent.

The Zoid does have some design flaws, but at the time, they were the lightest and smallest tents I could find.

Specs say it's only 6 ft long, so if you're close to that tall or taller...

If you want really light weight, and money is not an object, Stephensons Warmlites are supposed to be great. I have never tried one, but they sure sound interesting...