Tents are generally much easier to erect than years gone by but it is still worth practising putting up your new tent before your first trip with it. You can always pitch it in a local park if you don’t have a garden or if it isn’t big enough.

Always pitch the tent so that the doorway is out of the prevailing wind and a slight slope enables water to drain away where a flat pitch may become waterlogged. If you are on privately owned land make sure you have permission and make sure there is no trace left of your passing.

Care of your tent prolongs its life. These days the groundsheet is much thinner than days gone by and most people invest in a ‘cut to size’ piece of plastic (easy to obtain from DIY shops) under the tent to protect the sewn in groundsheet.

Look after you investment. If your tent was packed up wet, make sure you take it out to air and hang it up somewhere to dry properly when you get home. this saves any nasty niffs next time you come to use it! Remove any dirt with warm water and a soft brush.

Seam Sealing

Although most modern tent sewing techniques use threads which expand and fill any stitching holes when wet, most tent manufacturers cover themseleves by suggesting that you seam seal your shelter prior to use in potentially heavy rain. This is fairly easy to do and just requires a warm dry day (possibly the hard part!).

If the design will allow it, invert the tent and pitch it inside out, so the seams are slightly under tension. Let the material get warm in the glorious sunshine! Get your tube of seam sealant (most outdoor shops sell it) and squirt a little onto the bottom of a glass jam jar. Then using a children's cheap stiff stipple painting brush, dab it in the sealant and stipple it along the seams, a small amount at a time.

It isn't a quick job, but done this way it is much neater than squirting sealant all over the place which leads to unsightly blobs all over the material.

Then let the finished job dry in the sunshine for an hour or so and when completly dry, you can pack the tent away and the material won't stick together.