Better Tarp Pitch for Rain - 5 Tips for Tarp Set Ups

Description

Many people have problems with tarps in wet weather, many times it is simply due to their set up and not the tarp. This video has a couple important tips for wet weather and a few others as well. Watch this video and make a much better set up for your tarp. Take a look at our tarps here http://wildernessinnovation.com/survival-supplies/survival-items/personal-survival-tarp/ Also our tarps come with tent stakes that have shock cord in them to help maintain tension on the tarp. Our tent stake bag doubles as a mount for a support pole.

Tags: tarp,shelter,survival shelter,survival training,survival gear,outdoors,camping,how to set up tarp,nylon tarp,pitch tarp,leaky tarp,tarp cave in,tent stake,shock cord

Video Transcription

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my objective today is to show you some tips about using tarps some common mistakes that get made and some ways to cure those things to make your tarp work better for you and and allow you to be able to be more successful in your setup hey Perry peacock here with wilderness innovation and up here finally got up top of the mountains above above my house above our shop up here about ten thousand four hundred feet today still got some snow on on the east and north facing slopes here but there's a nice spot right here on the ridge it's in a little grove of trees most of this Ridge area and most of this face is just grass and low brush but so grove of trees allows me a spot to set up my tarp and and it actually stops most of the wind that's coming through the wind is you know 15 20 miles an hour typically up through here right so what I've done here is I've got a set up that is basically an a-frame I've staked the back wall down you can see the afternoon and evening sun shining through somewhat in the back there that instead of leaving this in down I want it to raise it up this is one of my this is one of my favorite styles of setup is the a-frame with one edge lifted alright so what I've done here is we just came from the opposite side over there and that's where I have that pole up so that's the high point on the tarp on this edge out here and everything slopes either off that way it slopes back this way and I've tied I've used a a MIDI clip right here to give myself a little bit different tight out point and my goal here is just to have a low point yeah that way any water that collects up here can come down and run off this way harmlessly off to the ground and out and down the slope one of the things you want to try not to do with the tarp or even a tent for that matter but tents are usually constructed that way you sit down to think about it is you don't want to get anywhere on your tarp setup where you're allowing water to stand because if I get even this right here I probably would end up anchoring this thing tying it off a little lower to pull down more if you get some water in here or you get some water up there and say you get a quart of water or whatever it makes a little Bowl in there well that bowl attracts more water and pretty soon it gets bigger and bigger and you can get to the point where you collapse your setup because your trees your lines or whatever can't hold all the weight you know it's on a tarp this size you could get hundreds of pounds of water in there you don't want to be holding water you want the water to shed off they have not build up all right now here we have the back side this is the sight the wind is pushing against you can see it pushing on it here this is very steep even if I even if I had a tarp that wasn't sealed very good or wasn't very waterproof or water resistant if it had gotten very old and didn't work very well anymore I set up with a steepness like this would likely shed virtually all the water anyway and anything that did come through it so steep on the inside you would want to just run down the inside of the fabric to the bottom so steepness is an important factor and you want to have typically somewhere around 260 degrees or so of pitch and typically they used to tell us in the Boy Scouts you know if you get a good if you get a solute here you know you got about a 45 degree here so you want to go up you know higher than that and we're I don't know what we are here we're probably somewhere at about a sixty or something right here

this type of setup right here is going to maximize the water shedding capability of any tarp you use even if you used a bedsheet this would help keep water off of you by having a steep pitch like this okay so so we have a steep pitch a lot of times many many times you see pictures on the internet of people have made shelters and they got an angle like this now you got an angle like that your if you got it if you put a tarp over it that tarp is going to be puddling up waters water and puddles all over the place then you got a chance of it leaking or you have a chance of overstressing everything because you're collecting fifty a hundred pounds of water or more on top of your roof of your shelter all right something else I'm going to show you right here is on this tarp are our tarps come with six tent stakes abs practically unbreakable and they come with shock cord to the top of the tent stake that can be used in in a couple different strength settings this is the maximum strength setting where it's doubled over but the nice thing about this I've got a steady wind pushing on this tarp well when you get those wind gusts and everything this thing can stretch which helps your tarp to remain taught in in the weather conditions and not so you don't have to come out and keep tightening things down all that sort of thing so I've got this used on this back side so as the wind pushes on it see it can stretch and so that's the kind of a that can be an important thing I don't always use the shock cord on there sometimes I go straight through it the tent stake but often times especially if it's windy and stuff like that oftentimes I'll do something like this so I can maintain some tension on my tarp in the wind all right now something else to show you here often to see people pitch a tarp that's something like this it's got a little bit of slope but not that much to it now you see what happens here as it rains you see we wind up collecting water we wind up with a spot in here

that's not leaking but it could if we got more water in there if the tarp develops some kind of problem or if the tarp did not does not accept much water pressure you can see right there so that water is in there now I can I can do all kinds of things on this but you see that water is just going to sit there right so if I put this pull back inside of here you'll notice this pole I don't know if I showed you this this is the tent stake bag that comes one of the that comes with your tarp all of our tarps come with that this is one of three shock cord assemblies that come with a cord lock a shock cord loop so I just put this over a stick it's got velcro here this tab right here underneath all the tabs tie out tabs in the middle section of the tarp underneath there is a another velcro mating velcro to this so I can stick this up in there I don't have to tie it off any kind of way I just put it in there stick the velcro together you can hear that that's got a big enough patch of velcro that will stick on there really nicely so now as I raise this up so I raise this up see it's making that water what to go somewhere else it was a tension up the cord not water is gone okay so now on this other side of the tarp I'll create a low point by the way I've tied that off and wherever water wants to go in here wants to wants to run off of there so I've created an easy way for water to run off that into the tarp so that's one of the things I've done is as you a lot of people just put up tarps they just string it up and don't think about it but you've got to think about how water will run off you got to think about how steep the pitch needs to be you got to be looking for spots that will that may tend to trap some water and start at puddling and pulling on you to summarize our little deal today

one of the tips is to pitch your tarp steep enough so you get water good water shedding abilities when you're in to where you're not pitched too steep you want to make sure that you do something that allows that makes the water want to channel off of your tarp and just think about I've got a high spot on this side and I'm low on that side so you don't have to put up a tarp so that everything is even all the way across the other thing is the shock corded tent stakes which can be very handy for maintaining tension in the wind and using a pole like this sort of thing to some interior locations like I've done here to create a high point so I can create a high point my ridge lines right here so I can create a high point that's actually away from my ridge line and it's even away from my tie out line here so I can create a high point somewhere else by using a pole such as this and so that's another thing good tight ridgeline and and then I've pitched I know the area here and I know the storms tend to swirl in from this direction back here and this is in fact a prevailing wind all the trees actually lean pretty much in the direction that I've got my tarp my tarp here the trees are leaning this direction because of the wind just virtually always blows this direction so so I'm kind of trying to shield myself in that way as well so pari peacock with wilderness innovation just with us several tarp tips that are intended to help you make your tarp setups be more effective keep yourself drier keep yourself better protected and make a tent pitch that is that works better for you you