Sounds like you did what you could but like many have said, earplugs are a necessity when camping imo. I like silicone as the foam tend to get weird/stiff when it gets cold and will never be as comfy.
I’ve had several nights in Moab, Jackson Hole, and Colorado with good wind and snow. Never had a strut problem but I don’t have anything on the roof except a 10lb solar panel.
Just wanted to add that I was in that same storm in an open area 50 or so miles from you that night - near the Needles District. I was lucky and my wedge was facing into the wind, but I ended up doing the same thing you did. I pulled it down and slept in the truck bed. I was impressed by the performance of the tent. It was stout and would have been fine. I just wanted to get some sleep, since the wind never let up (constant 30mph with 40 - 50 mph gusts), the tent was flapping, and the truck was rocking. Kind of a gnarly night all around. I agree with others that in the end, the GFC is still a tent. As I drove past some other campers who spent the night in regular tents the next morning, they looked pretty beat up. Enjoying the rig for sure!
Bumping this thread because 1/3rd of my nights so far in the GFC have been negatively disrupted by wind, while wearing ear plugs. It absolutely performs worse than a ground tent in terms of noise. I measured the volume of the door flaps whacking against the bottom of the tent at 45-50db compared to a background noise level of 30db. A staked ground tent barely measures above the background noise level. This is because the fly is tight over the outside of the tent and usually has about a 2-3" gap, meaning it can flex under gusts without coming in contact with the tent body.
I have thought about just sleeping in the bed or breaking out my ground tent when I know it’s going to be windy, but often the wind will come in the middle of night and the last thing you want to do is get out of bed and set this stuff up.
Bottom line, I’m not sure what it is to “perform” in the wind. Yeah, the thing doesn’t break - but it makes way more noise than a ground tent because there’s no way to stake down the edges of the “fly” (the door flaps). If a tent is supposed to provide a comfortable place to sleep, this doesn’t do that in the wind. The slack in the tent just flaps against the body of the tent creating sleep-disrupting noise.
What I’d love to do is just add 2-3 grommets / eyelets at the bottom of each door flap and then get some mounting hardware to pin them outwards so the tent doesn’t flap against the sides of itself.
I’m sick of losing sleep over this. Anyone got suggestions on hardware to pin through grommets and stick the flaps out? I don’t want to buy those rain poles someone here makes that are backordered and too big for this use case anyway.
Interesting. I can’t compete with decibel readings, but my qualitative assessment is that since I’m so much more comfortable, I sleep better than a ground tent.
I have a V1 early tent, so maybe that is the difference with flapping. I don’t have any slack and there isn’t anything to pin down if the tent is zipped up.
But it is never windy in Nevada, that could be the issue too.
I’ve only ever had two nights of poor sleep out of almost a hundred in my camper. Both were due to wind. Both were winds over 50 mph. Both were nights with multi-directional gusts. To be fair, I can’t even sleep well in the house with 50 mph winds. I don’t have an issue with it, but I also have a v1.
I’m less focused on high winds, I’m thinking of winds 15-30MPH. Here’s what happens and how I’ve temporarily solved it.
From the factory, there’s no way to tension and secure the flaps of the GFC door tent so that they don’t flap around and whack against the side of the tent in the wind. Ground tents all have this.
Just using tarp clips to tension the sides to the external tracks solves this problem. Its not solved by zipping the doors all the way down because there’s still no downward tension on the tent fabric. Without that tension, every gust pushes the slack fabric up against the inside of the tent and creates 30-50db impacts.
Agreed, I’m still curious as to the method behind the madness of these not being fully zipped? Over the weekend I had snow billow up inside the back door. I woke up to an internal blizzard.
LOL, I’m more of a McDonalds coffee guy and was shocked in Missoula when I tried to get an extra large at the drive thru and they were like ‘Uh we don’t have those’ LOL. If you’re ever back up in that area let me know and we can go for a tour. Then geek out on our setups LOL
This looks like an easy and simple solution. What sort of hooks did you use with the tarp clips in the first pic? And do you have any issues with them sliding around at all?
They are just small S hooks from the hardware store. There’s enough tension that they don’t slide around. They do scratch the paint a bit though.
Nice, Thanks! I was thinking maybe a rubber coating on the end of the s hook might help with scratching and sliding if that was an issue.
I was told that the tent doors do not have full zippers because:
“The reason we do not zip the bottom doors is because it is a single wall tent and you need air moving through the tent to minimize condensation build up.”
Yet they offer the tent without side doors so they could actually offer them with full zippers and leave it up to the user to choose to fully zip or not
Just curious if anyone has tried some small magnets and something like tenacious tape or gear repair fabric to glue and hold everything together. Need to seal up a little better and maintain the peace for kids sake lol.
Let me know your thoughts?
Just commenting here.
After spending 3-6 months sleeping in the tent all over Baja and the west, this is a poor tent design.
I advise that future models be made with full zippers, and let the customer decide how to vent airflow.
A much better solution for the rest of us would,be to alter your doors so they zip on the bottom or if possible full zip because rolling the sides up kind of sucks too.
The sound of the external tent flaps and the screen flaps just smack against each other all night in addition to the zipper pulls which I’ve just e-taped all of them.
a full perimeter zipper could be a great addition, one of the things that has always bugged us about the flap design is that it doesn’t open from the top down. There have been plenty of occasions when we want to have the flap open partially but not be visible to the outside world, sadly that’s not possible with how they zip as is. On windy nights we have started to roll up the inside screen, this definitely cuts down dramatically on the slapping of the flap and the screen, tho still not entirely ideal.
I agree that the tent flap design doesn’t fully make sense to me. The two standard rtt’s that I’ve had were built much better. Not having fully zipping doors makes zero sense. And also, maybe I’m uneducated in the engineering aspect, but what do the screen doors have so much excess material? They’re so sloppy and over sized.
I love the GFC but the tent portion is poor.
I used some stick on tent snaps, 2 each door, along the bottom of the flaps. They really cut down on the noise. They don’t work the greatest on the back flap since GFC made it too narrow so it can’t be fully zipped down
I agree with the bottom of the doors. They could be much better. Stick on tent snaps? Pictures or link?
Peace.
There may be a better version out there but this is what I used. At first I thought that they would have issues sticking but they’ve been on for about 6 months with no problems.
