Which type of lighting would you recommend for a 2-3 man tent?
Submitted by admin on June 25, 2011 – 2:00 pm6 Comments
Sir Nathan.King of Hippies asked:
I have various types.
A gas lantern
An ordinary battery lantern
And a couple of those LED battery lanterns
The LED are very bright and light to carry as well so was thinking of just using those. The gas gives off a good light though but maybe not too safe in a small tent?
Also, are those wind up radios any good?
I have a 2-3 man dome tent
They have camping lights on the site below. Battery operated I think would be best. The gas lights are great for having outside the tent though.
Battery Lanterns work great for in-tent use and I would imagine that the LED’s would work well too. I would recommend using a gas lantern inside a tent. The fumes and risk of fire spell trouble waiting to happen.
The wind up radios are popular in survival kits. My experience with anything wind up was with a flashlight, and it was very poor.
NO open flames or gas fuel! These are a fire hazard and emit fumes, my dear. Use them in a tent and you could hurt or kill yourself.
What I use on camping trips is LED headlamp. Then my light is always exactly where I need it. You can wear it right up into your sleeping bag, and then last thing before you hunker down for the night is to take it off your head and wear it around your neck, or put it somewhere in the bag with you where you won’t roll onto it…like right above your head, in the hood of your mummy bag, so you know exactly where it is!
These are also relatively bright and can light up a whole tent if you clip them somehow to the ceiling of your tent and just let the light shine down. If you don’t have any sort of loop or a gear loft up there, and many tents do have a place to hang stuff you can quite easily make one by very very carefully tacking up some dental floss with some hem stitches…by that I mean you should not see any of your sewing from the opposite side of the fabric (the outside). For this you don’t even go through the fabric of the tent, you just catch a thread and come back through on the inside, on a single layer of a seam. Go across to another safe point on the same seam, tie it off, so you have about a 6inch tiny loose running clothesline. It helps if you have a hexagonal or dome tent with six panels sewn together at the top, then you have 6 seams and can make up to 6 of these, crossing in the middle, and then use a really lightweight clip of some sort (paper clip, titanium carabiner, safety pin) to hang a very lightweight LED headlamp from all the strings at once. This way the weight will be even across all the seams instead of pulling from any one of them, and there will be less impact. That is the easiest way I know to explain it, but if you don’t get it, don’t try to do it.
Under a tarp this is easy you just hang a light from your ridge cord using a clip and some p-cord.
Definately LEDS !
Simple lighting: headlamp. You won’t need anything else.
You’ve already got good suggestions on the lighting so I’ll just comment on the radios. I think they are great — if you get a good one (like LL Bean sells.) I worked for 3 weeks at a remote archaeology field camp in the Wyoming mountains one summer — every morning we would take turns cranking up the radio and listen to NPR news while we had breakfast. It would get about 15 minutes per cranking. Because we were so high up, we got excellent reception.