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Some background links to Aravona's question here. Basically I am her other half and over the course of the night the tent was opened many times. As people will know opening a tent in the wee hours of the morning will lose all the heat accumulated through the day and take a long time to warm back up. It warming up is nearly impossible if a certain someone has to keep leaving, bolting for open ground.
My question is this: What methods / equipment can be used to warm a tent up rather quickly?
Basically you should never find yourself in such a situation under normal circumstances. Tents are supposed to keep you warm, and not the other way round. If you are doing that more often then I'd say you have the wrong gear being used at the wrong place. Yet, there may rise a situation when you need to do it, there are ways to do it, but honestly you'll need to be very careful and cautious about them. Firstly, Larger tents require more heating, and require more insulation to keep the heat in.
But IMHO, I'd certainly count on my sleeping gear and body warmers more than these products.
One way I was taught in the uk armed forces (a very long time ago) was to use dry rocks.
Heat the rock in your camp fire, then carefully just before bed time, place the rock inside your shelter, the rock releases it's heat slowly and acts very much like a radiator producing a consistent source of dry heat.
this method was never designed with polyester tents in mind, it was designed more for the hand made shelters that you may build in a survival situation, and where the heated rocks would be placed on bare earth.
With a little bit of common sense however, for example place the hot rock on some logs or a layer of thick sticks, and not allowing it to touch portions of the tent that prolonged contact with t may melt, then you should be pretty much ok.
The heat it will generate will be dry dissipated heat such as would be obtained from a radiator or convection heater, so should not in any way damage the tent, also make sure that you heat rocks that are 100% dry, if there is any moisture at all in them then you run the risk of them cracking and even exploding in the fire, it's not funny when it happens either, I know from experience!!
It's not a perfect solution, and it does take you a few hours to heat the rocks up, then you also need a suitable way to carry them, because they WILL burn flesh quite easily, but if done with care, it will work and should work well.
I was just re-reading this, when I remembered something else that's of use in this situation.
Many of you who do outdoor type stuff might carry with your supplies some of those reflective Mylar survival blankets (Like the type rescuers use when they rescue people who are hypothermic).
Whats often not realized though is these things are not just good for wrapping yourself in, but, if you use a bit of duct tape fashioned into a loop you can stick them up on the inside of your tent above your head and up the sides.
Beacuse of the reflective properties a lot of the heat that rises from things like body heat, or other heat sources in the tent, gets immediately reflected back down over back into the main tent space.
Also because of the general thermal properties of Mylar, any heat that does make it through will be a lot less than any heat that would escape directly through the polyester/canvas on it's own.
Shawty
First of all a tent is made from two thin layers of fabric, expecting it to have sufficient thermal efficiency to retain heat, even with the door closed is perhaps a bit ambitious. Any heat built up in the daytime will be long gone before it even gets to the wee hours. A tent is a shelter that keeps off the rain and the wind, nothing more.
Since any attempt to retain heat is utterly futile, the only way to actually warm the tent is to produce heat faster than it dissipates. The quickest way to do that (here I assume large family tent) is to put the cooker on. Alternatively gas lanterns are dual purpose, producing heat as well as light. Both of these come with a word of extreme caution though. Fire + Tent + People + Alcohol = Disaster waiting to happen. Once these are switched off the temperature will drop sharply, even with the door closed.
Since you're talking about the 'wee hours', when you're in bed presumably and putting the cooker or lantern on isn't an option, then perhaps a better wording for your question would have been "How to stay warm in a tent". The simple answer to this is to get a better sleeping bag and ground insulation. Being too warm is a nicer problem than being too cold.
I'm not one for putting extra layers on to go to bed, so I have a 3 season synthetic fill bag, (rated down to 0 degrees) for the warmer months and a 4 season goose down bag for the winter (rated down to -20 degrees). I've found these work perfectly for the UK.
There are plenty of 2 season bags in the shops, but I'd only recommend these for warmer climates than the UK. Any sleeping bag will deteriorate over time, so I'd recommend getting one that is a little too warm at the beginning of it's life, then it's good for ten or more years.
My 4 season bag is super lush and cosy (and expensive) but ironically is actually only a one season bag, winter, it's simply too warm at any other time of year. So whilst advocating thicker sleeping bags on one hand, I'd also say that there is definitely a point where that will become overkill.
My girlfriend didn't make it as far as the door, that's a different story. All I can say is that sleeping bags with synthetic insulation can be cleaned far more easily than down filled ones. They also will still have some thermal efficiency even when wet.
P.S. I also answered your girlfriends previous question, sounds like you had a good time lol. Hope the weather was kind, I've since camped in north wales in the rain on a swamped campsite, ha ha. :-)
To warm a tent, you need to produce more heat. There is a fun way to do this if you're sharing with another person. If this question is aimed at settling an argument with your girlfriend, I would definitely advocate this method. Other than generating more heat with your body, you could burn fossil fuels (risky, poisonous) or use an electric heating element (risky, battery operated).
If you're looking at heat loss from the tent, you either need to make sure the minimum heat escapes when you open the door (e.g. by not opening it if possible), or to make the tent a better insulator. Making the tent out of a thicker material like canvas may go some way to keeping the heat in, or using a foil / mylar covering that reflects the heat back in. As you lose most of your heat through the ground, making the groundsheet from an insulating material would make any heat produced in the tent stick around for longer.
I spent every night in my tent with temperatures between -15 °C to -35 °C. However, I only have a sleeping bag for +3 °C. This is how I keep myself warm anyway:
A lot of good and correct things have been said here. However I want to add something:
When I used to sleep in a tent, I took a UCO candle lantern (http://www.amazon.de/Relags-UCO-Kerzenlaterne/dp/B0028BY9N8) to give me light, but also heat. It works similar to the hot stone, but is much more safe and easy to operate.
If the tent is good enough, this small and quite safe to use, lantern, will heat up your tent quite quickly.
In general you can also say: The smaller the tent, the more warm it will get.
You don't.
The tent is not an insulated structure. It protects from the wind and the rain.
Inside your tent, you need insulation, such as a sleeping bag or warm clothes. That's what you warm up. A good trick to warm your sleeping bag is to fill a nalgene with boiling water, put it in a sock, and put that in your sleeping bag. It'll be toasty for hours.
I spent 7 field seasons camping for 5 weeks each on Mt Erebus, Antarctica. Inside the tent it's usually well below freezing, and that's fine. For warmth, you are either wearing clothes (down booties for the win!), or in a sleeping bag.
I also have done some high-altitude mountaineering in the Cascades and the Andes, and the same rules hold. A warm tent is generally an annoyance that happens due to the greenhouse effect in the morning if you're not climbing for whatever reason.
edit: Ok so... I remembered that there is at least one couple that likes to warm up their tent on Erebus, for reasons. They use a stove, but these are Scott tents that we cook in all the time. The thing is, there is extreme danger of carbon monoxide poisioning and we've had some close calls so you're actually supposed to have the tent door open whenever the stove is on, which means it's cold. This couple breaks that rule. Never ever light a stove in a tent and then lie down for a rest... if you fall asleep, there is a very good chance you won't be waking up.
You can dig a hole then burn wood in it when it turns to coals put dirt back on it then tent over that believe me it works good
The question is how to quickly warm a tent.
Answer is: use the most efficient way to turn material into heat energy, which will speedily bring up the temperature in the tent.
I have used a fuel stove to warm the air inside the tent before, the draw back on this is that you need to bring extra fuel. This method is only suitable for certain type of fuel stoves - the one that burns fuel thoroughly because carbon monoxide is poisonous & it does not heat up the ground below because you don't want a hole on the floor of your tent. Also the roof of your tent need to be high enough so the naked flame would not affect it.
There are portable heaters that you can buy that run on the same bottled gas you use for camp cooking. It uses the identical principle - turning fuel into heat energy. There are quite a few youtube videos on that: (1, 2 ...). But if you use a stove, you can put it to other uses while warming yourself: i.e. brewing yourself a cup of tea which you also can use to quickly make yourself feel warmer.
