The cause of leaking tents is often due to the following reasons:. There are various ways of waterproofing your tent to ensure a great camping experience. Among them are:. Storing a wet tent in a backpack or cabinet can cause several issues. The rainfall may be too heavy, forcing the tent to leak, regardless of the quality of the fabric.
The hydrostatic head value refers to the height of the water column in millimeters, which the tent fabric can hold without getting soaked. Never camp in a tent during a thunderstorm. Once this coating is damaged, camping in harsh weather conditions becomes impossible as water leaks into the tent. A wet or damp tent caused by morning dew and condensation: This will develop into mold or mildew, giving it a funky odor.
Mildew affects the tent adversely as it breaks the fiber on cotton, canvas, and polyurethane, and creates black stains that are hard to remove. When you touch wet canvas, surface tension will draw water to your finger.
When you take your finger away, this wicking will stop. However, the drop left behind where you touched, like any irregular point on an overhead surface, will draw condensation from inside the tent if it is humid. Since it usually is humid when it is raining, the condensation will build until you get a drop, but not all of it falls.
What is left will still draw condensation more than the rest of the inside tent surface, so it will appear to leak from that point as long as the humidity is high. Condensation There is water in the air around you all the time.
Warmer air can hold much more water vapor than colder air. When water vapor in the air comes into contact with something cool, like the ceiling of a tent, its molecules slow down and get closer together. When that happens, the gaseous water vapor turns back into liquid water droplets.
Materials: 2 clear plastic cups, room-temperature water, ice cubes, gallon-size ziplock plastic bag. The cup exposed to more air has the most moisture on the outside of it. This moisture came from water vapor in the air that condensed on the outside of the cup.
The cup in the bag has very little to no moisture on it because it is exposed to much less air. Less air means less water vapor. Some people think that the moisture that appears on the outside of a cold cup is water that has leaked through the cup. How does this demonstration prove that this idea is not true? Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Does touching the tent outer wall from the inside make it leak?
Ask Question. Asked 6 years, 2 months ago. Active 5 years, 5 months ago. Viewed 21k times. As a bonus but not really outdoor related: What is the reason for one material to not leak? Improve this question. Community Bot 1. Growing up in Western Washington, I learned two very important and inviolable rules about camping. If someone has somehow managed to produce a tent that truly is, something is very wrong with the world.
What's next? Human Sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria? Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Don't think the hydrostatic head measures this per se. Snowcrash Snowcrash 4 4 bronze badges. I think capillary action is why the tent lets water through when you touch it.
Whereas the hydrostatic head measures how easily the material gets wet, rather than just having water on the outer surface. I don't see how this would be capillary action, as that requires some kind of narrow conduit, like a capillary.
But the structure did not change during the finger touch. The touch would break the surface tension, however. SnowCrash, Right. As Dynadin explained quoting from his answer In older tents the hydrostatic head was usually quite low.
One question: Have you ever bought a cheap rain-jacket? Gets wet at the elbows first than belly. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. Featured on Meta.
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