Camping is wonderful when everything goes well: food tastes better, you feel in harmony with nature and you wake up rested and raring to go. Well, unless you are cold at night, that is. Being cold keeps you awake, even when you are exhausted, and if you do manage to fall asleep, waking up cold and miserable does not bode well for your plans for the day! But it is quite possible to keep yourself and your fellow campers warm and content, even on cold and miserable days! Let us take a look at three of them.
Insulation
Make sure your tent is breeze-proof. It should have at least two layers of waterproofed fabric between you and the outside world, and be sturdy enough to turn away even the laziest wind. (Lazy winds go straight through you, rather than around!) Even if you start off with the inside of your tent as cold as the outside, with a little body heat and no wind chill factor to whisk away every vestige of warmth, there will soon be a cosier atmosphere inside the tent, even without any other heating solution being used.
Firepits
Firepits are designed to burn fuel slowly, while throwing out the heat in a particular direction. This ensures that you and your fellow campers get the benefit of the warmth your firepit generates rather than heating up the ground underneath and the unoccupied empty spaces on the other side of the pit. Firepits can be portable, so you can move it to suit your needs, or they can be fixed in place, especially if they are the larger firepits which would be too heavy to move in any case. Firepits can be a great source of warmth throughout the entire night. They do not go inside the tent, but they can be reasonably close, and are often sufficiently warm to raise your body heat enough that you can comfortably go to bed in the insulated but otherwise unheated tent without suffering from the cold. Get firepits in the UK from Forest Fuel – visit their website here!
Hot Stuff
A final way to raise the warmth level of your tent is by carrying in some of the heat of your firepit! Heat up water to fill hot water bottles, or take this appreciation of the thermal capacity of water further by filling large metal or reinforced plastic containers with hot water and standing them around the tent. Over the night, the water will slowly release that heat into the tent, keeping you all warm and toasty. Old-fashioned warming pans can be used in a similar way, or you can go even more basic by heating up large rocks to dot about the tent (suitably wrapped in a thick fabric cover to both maintain the heat of the rocks and prevent people from burning themselves)
Whichever method you opt for – and you can choose all of these options to give yourself the best chance of staying warm while camping – always be safe rather than sorry, banking open fires and ensuring that the risk of burns is minimised as much as possible.
