#TENT AIRBEAM PLUS#

Do I give a shit? No, it goes in the boot of the car, and either trollied to a pitch at a festival or pitched next to the car. So much less fannying around on my own than the smaller tent was, a bigger one would be a sodding nightmare. The Decathlon is perfect for me on my own, it’s such a piece of piss to put up, just stake out the groundsheet, lay out the tent and pang a peg at each corner, pump for ten minutes. I emphasise again, for the hard of thinking, one person. However I’ve got fed up with a tent I can’t stand up in, has no room to sit in in a chair when the weather’s a bit mizzy, and anything bigger would be that much more of a pain in the ass for one person to put up quickly and easily. Yes tents from argos do tend to not work all that well… i assume your new fangled air beam tent cost much more than a tent from argos so if it wasnt at least half the time id be disappointed airbean or not.Īrgos? Do Argos sell Eurohike tents? Mine came from Millets, cost me £75 and I’ve had a fair bit of use out of it over the last six years or so, including camping away for nine days. No, inflatable AirBeam tents aren’t essential, but ime they’re super convenient and the main downside is the premium you pay for them in the first place. The Vango ones have a pump with a pressure blow-off valve so you can’t over-inflate them – really early ones could pop (we blew two tubes at 24/12 a few years back to general amusement) but have been significantly beefed-up since. The beams can theoretically ‘pop’, but you’re looking at a tough inner tube inside a zipped, toughened sleeve in turn running inside a channel inside the the tent fabric, so you’d have to make a proper effort to hole one. With a relatively simple tent design like an oversized tunnel tent, it’s not a huge difference, but if you’ve ever wrestled with a huge, multi-poled family tent, inflatables are a bit of a revelation.

#TENT AIRBEAM PLUS#

The three I’ve used have been as solid as traditional poled tents plus they have the bonus of deforming then springing back in really strong winds rather than failing catastrophically.Īs far as convenience goes, it depends what you’re comparing. I’d take issue with the ‘not as sturdy’ line. Cons are they are more expensive, can puncture, potentially not as sturdy when set up and more expensive. Less than 1% quicker over the time of a week or two’s holiday.

Pro’s are you don’t have a separate bag of tent poles, but you do have a pump or compressor (which you might have anyway to be fair) and they a little, tiny, wee bit quicker to set up and take down. It’s a solution looking for a problem I think. Maybe if there’s two people putting up a regular tent and can work each pole through from each end, then the time might be similar, but I’m on my own, and the inflatable tent is just so much easier. The young couple next to me were very impressed and took a few photos with the intent (ha!) of getting one like it.īloke who lives next door to me has a Decathlon like mine, but the slightly smaller blackout one, and loves it.

The total time taken to get the tent up and lines pegged out was at least half the time it took to just get the poles in place on my old Eurohike. Compared to the amount of time I used to spend phaffing around getting the poles out, then trying to thread the bloody things through the little pockets and get them into the end fittings, walking backwards and forwards around the tent, easing the poles through sections where they got caught, then the poles came apart and had to be fitted back together, probably about twenty-thirty minutes, the five minutes or so it took to inflate my much bigger Decathlon last weekend was a revelation.

Tent airbeam