Keeping Your Tent Cool

Let's face it.  The temperature inside tents is difficult to control.  Tent walls are only a fraction of an inch thick, and while they do protect us from wind and rain and snow and sun, they do not do a good job of insulating the interior against changes in the outside temperature. 

The first trick to keeping your tent cool is where you set it up.  Try to set it up in a shady location near a grassy area, stream or body of water.  Doing so will help keep the air around your tent cooler and therefore the air inside your tent cooler.  Take advantage of any shade you can:  trees, awnings and canopies, even the shadow of an RV if you are camped near one.  Try to align windows and doors to take advantage of prevailing breezes.

Provide adequate ventilation.  Trapped, stale area is more likely to capture heat and warm up than moving air.  Moving air will also help you fell cooler and more comfortable.  Open windows on opposite sides of the tent to encourage air flow and make sure one of them is exposed to the prevailing breeze whenever that is possible.  

If you have a rain fly, use it!  Rain flys shade the tent itself and usually provide at least an inch or so air gap between the tent wall and the fly, which helps reduce the transfer of heat into the interior.  You might try shading your tent with a tarp, but without proper spacing it will likely touch the tent fabric in many places it can heat the interior via conduction of heat through the tarp to the tent fabric in into the tent.  Actually, putting a canopy, such as a dining fly over it will  probably work better than draping a tarp over it.  A tarp lying on the tent fabric will allow heat to be conducted between the two fabrics while having the tent in the shade of a canopy will protect the tent from both radiant heat from the sun and conduction from the tarp to the tent fabric.

I have seen people attempt to cool tents by spraying the window screens with water to act like an evaporative cooler.   Or even spraying the tent itself.  That might help a little in dry climates but even the best evaporative coolers don't work well in when the humidity is above 50% and work best below 25%.  Many popular campgrounds are near lakes or streams where the average humidity is often higher.  The small amount of water the thin screen can hold and the limited surface area doesn't allow for very much cooling.   The pads on evaporative coolers are typically an inch or so thick.  You will probably feel cooler spraying the water on your body.  Cooling the tent fabric might help a little, but if it is exposed to direct sunlight it is still going to get hot inside.

One way to feel cooler in your tent is to dress cooler.  Thin, light weight clothing will allow your own body heat to escape more easily, helping you feel cooler.  You can even safely wear T-shirts and shorts or swimwear since you won't be out in the sunlight risking sunburn and UV exposure.

Sometimes you will feel cooler outside your tent than inside.  As the sun warms the tent fabric, the air inside warms up too.  There will almost always be more breeze outside your tent than inside.  Even with the windows open the tent will restrict air flow to some extent, so going outside will usually let you feel cooler and more comfortable.   Find a nice shady spot to cool off in!

Keep cool if you can!