Quote:
Originally Posted by LexiB
It's one of our pop down beds. It always has a lot of condensation when someone is sleeping in it and the other side never does that. It doesn't leak but I figured that waterproofing would help the condensation.
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RogerR touched on condensation.
Insulation over the tent end helps. Ventilation helps. But condensation implies cold outside and/or rain. Ventilation defeats heat.
Depending on your style of camping...boondocking or with shore power...a fan can help, too.
There are 12 volt fans designed to attach to the pipe that holds up the tent-end frame. They are often supplied with new pop-ups. Even if you don't have the fan, your rig may have the power to a 1/4" phone plug socket near the pipe frame. Adding such an outlet would be fairly easy. If you typically camp where there is shore power, a comparable clip on 120 volt fan will work.
The challenge in a pop-up is that the tent ends are not heated well by the furnace, and the single layer of fabric is not insulated. This makes the canvas the coldest surface in the camper, and you are sleeping in it...exhaling moisture all night. It can actually "rain inside" the tent end.
Heated air combats condensation. Pushing furnace heat from the main body of the rig into the tent end substantially reduces the "
relative humidity" in the air and reduces condensation. As you heat the air, its capacity to hold moisture without condensing out increases. So finding a way to pump the furnace-heated air into the tent end will drastically reduce condensation in the tent end...and significantly improve sleeping comfort for the occupants. The furnace pumps out air at very low relative humidity, and that relatively "dry" air can absorb a lot of moisture. (This accounts for many add-on humidifiers in home forced air furnaces.)
The reasons one tent end gets more condensation than the other have to do with furnace location and number of occupants of the tent end. In my old HW-277, the furnace was at the far end of the camper, near the guest bed...which was typically unoccupied. Meanwhile, our bed was far from the furnace with two humans exhaling substantial amounts of moisture into the tent end. A typical human will exhale
400 grams (
1.69 CUPS) of water per day. Overnight, a typical couple in bed will emit 1 1/8 cups of water in that tiny bed end.) Not to mention that, if it's cold and damp already, a temperature drop of a few degrees will cause considerable additional condensation. Air circulation from the main body of the rig into the tent end essentially eliminated condensation. Nothing's perfect, of course, and one night, late in the season, it was both cold and rainy. We didn't have an insulated cover over the tent end, and we got wet.
So much for condensation. If it's raining like hell, it's hard to leave the "windows" open for ventilation, and it's likely to be cold. Finding a way to pump furnace-heated air into the tent end where you sleep will help a lot...and so will an insulated blanket over the tent end.
__________________
Jim Moore
SW Colorado - 4-Corners Area
2020 Jayco X213 Rear Slide
2006 RAM 1500 with Firestone Airbags No WDH
400 watts of solar on the roof & 200 watt of suitcase 2 x GC2 batteries
Starlink Gen-3 running from a 500 watt pure sinewave inverter
Boondock almost exclusively on the shores of
Lake Vallecito