Efficient Hacks for Insulating Your Wall Tent in Chilly Weather

The cold weather should not keep you from your routine camping trip. Spending time outdoors and away from the hubbub of the city is beneficial to the body and soul. A 4 season tent like a canvas wall tent is what you need to get you through this adventure. 

When you are in the planning phase for this trip, get your gear out of storage and check if anything needs repair. Don’t forget, if the weather prediction for your campsite location shows low temperatures, a great addition to your prep would be to insulate your tent this season. 

Why Insulation Is Essential To The Camping Experience

In extremely colder months insulation will help prevent hypothermia. Even if you are layered up and have decided that you will not open the tent window flaps, your body heat can cause condensation inside the tent. Moisture results in mold which breeds diseases. Cold air begins with uncomfortable, sleepless nights, and major health risks like the aforementioned hypothermia. 

If you have never insulated your cabin camping tent before, here are some tried and tested methods that you can try on your upcoming trip. 

Make A Natural Insulating Layer On The Ground

You can prepare your camping spot with a layer of insulation so that cold does not seep in through the ground. Gather a bunch of dry leaves, grass, and pine needles. Straw is also an acceptable substitute. Create a mat of these materials beneath your tent. 

If you are not going to spend much time inside your tent than just sleeping; place this insulating layer under your sleeping bags instead of the entire tent. 

Get A Footprint

A tent footprint is a layer that makes the floor of your tent and is placed before you pitch your tent. Canvas wall tents don’t have a floor. If you are camping on hard ground or damp soil, you need a tarp footprint to act as a barrier between you and the cold ground. A footprint will also prevent melting snow from seeping into your tent in the morning.

Get The Right Bedding

With the ample space and headroom in a wall tent, occupants are always tempted to use a raised bed frame. One might think that a raised bed would protect you from the cold ground, and that is true, but you leave room for the cold wind to circulate under your mattress. With all that open space under your bed, you would need to insulate the mattress anyway. Therefore, a sleeping bag with a high R-value rating is the best option for a bed. 

An R-value rating tells you how well the product works against low temperatures. The higher the rating the more suited it is to extremely cold weather.

Use Sleeping Pads

Sleeping pads serve multiple functions. They make a smooth and cushioned floor so that it is comfortable for you to sleep. They also serve as a barrier between the sleeping bag and the cold ground. During the day you can use sleeping pads to lounge around in as floor mats. 

Like cold-weather sleeping bags, sleeping pads also come with an R-value rating. You can stack two pads together to increase the R-value of the pad. Sleeping pads are lightweight and are manufactured as both foam and inflatable types. If you are using inflatable pads make sure that they are fully inflated, under-inflated pads leave room for cold air to seep in. 

Use A Carpet

Synthetic rugs and carpets are great liners against the cold temperature. Instead of staking a footprint or a tarp beforehand just roll out a rug to make the floor of your tent. If you don’t want to ruin your carpets or rugs, you can also use old blankets stuffed with down to line the floor of your tent with. 

A carpet for a floor also means you can spend time inside your tent because it is more comfortable to walk around now. Wall tents have ample headroom and space for creating a small kitchen area, a space for sleeping, and an area to lounge around in, or just for a chair and a small desk. 

Stick To A Small Tent

When you are putting all that effort into heating the interior of your tent and insulating the walls and the floor, make it easier for yourself and get a smaller tent so that cold air does not have a headstart at distributing the cold into empty spaces. 

Size down the wall tent for fewer people and focus on how you would fit the necessities like your sleeping bags. 

Build The Popular Snow Windbreak

A snow windbreak uses snow itself to create a barricade against the winds. The way this works is that you make blocks of snow by hand or shovel and stack them over each other to build a wall that is as high as your waist. You could go higher but you don’t want to risk the wall toppling on itself. Make this wall surrounding your tent and sloping down to the ground where your door flap is located. 

Get A Bivy Sack

A bivvy sack is a sleeve for your sleeping bag. This is an insulating layer for your sleeping bag. The function of a bivvy sack is to protect you from moisture and wind through the night. 

Cover The Roof

There are two ways to insulate the roof of your wall tent. The first is that you use thermal blankets and attach them to the top of your tent after you have pitched it. The second is that you use foil foam sheets to cover the roof. 

Another trick is to cut pieces of an insulating blanket and line the ceiling of your wall tent with that. For this, you would have to sew or velcro the pieces before you head out for your camping trip, so that when you pitch the tent the insulating layer fits in place. 

Maximize The Effectiveness Of Your Efforts

Now that you have insulated your canvas tent, here is how you can ensure that there is a heat source to protect and you stay warm inside your tent. 

Pick The Right Spot

This hack doesn’t require that you invest in additional gear. Find a spot to pitch your tent where the wind won’t directly blow at your canvas walls. Trees and bushes are natural windbreakers, you want to pitch in front of them. 

If there are no windbreakers don’t pitch a sheet or tarp like a screen. The strong winds will collect on this barrier and with that force push it directly to your tent. An ideal screen should have some holes to allow for some air to flow through. 

Buy A Heater

A camping heater is a great way to keep the interior of your tent warm. Heaters custom-made for tents are available in outdoor stores. If you can’t get your hands on a tent heater just use a pair of space heaters. Make sure that you purchase portable ones.

All wall tents for camping are designed to equip wall tent stoves. A tent stove can be used for cooking as well as keeping the tent warm like a makeshift fireplace. Read up on the safety precautions of using a tent stove. The most common type of tent stove burns wood as fuel. You must see that the stove cools down before you sleep so there is no danger of any stray embers.

Use A Hot Bottle Or Hot Rocks

With a stove, you can heat a rock, wrap it in thick fabric like an old towel because it will burn a little, and place it in your sleeping bag before you hit the hay. This way when you go to sleep, the inside of the sleeping bag will be toasty and keep your body temperature from dropping. 

Hot rocks are also used to keep your clothes warm. For example, after leaving the hot rock out for 10 minutes, you can wrap your socks, beanie, and undergarments around them for a few minutes before donning these warm clothes. 

Another tactic is to use a hot water bottle that you can refill every few hours. 

If you don’t own a canvas tent and are ready to invest in your first wall tent, consider purchasing a tent that is already primed for insulation. A tent like this would have thermal insulation attached to the canvas. One of the ways outdoor companies do this is by covering the shelter with reflective coating so that heat stays trapped inside the tent.