Don't Buy a Hardshell Roof Top Tent Until You See This....

so i get a lot of questions about rooftop tents and one of them is what style of rooftop tent should i buy well i'm not gonna tell you what style to buy but today's video i'm gonna show you three of the main style of hard shell rooftop tents and i'm going to give you some of my thoughts and opinions we'll get my tent put back on the jeep and we'll take a look at a couple of the other styles of rooftop tents you guys might be interested in purchasing hey my tent back the side do you want uh do you want an opening on passenger driver passenger yes passenger because we got the awning on the uh driver's side does that make sense yeah and then i want to move the we'll move the latches so this nice thing about this tent you can actually move the latches so we've got the latches on the sides this tent isn't as wide as my last tent so it actually tucks in within the jeep's width a little bit we're gonna get the uh condor overland back on the jeep and then i'll show you a couple of the other models from roof nest this is a flip open style tent so it flips open and that gives you some features and benefits and i'll tell you about that but then we've also got the uh pop-up version which is the sparrow and then we've got the falcon the falcon pro which is a wedge style tint yeah i guess i won't go back out of here so we might get you to move over one spot don't don't scratch the paint all right [Laughter] i got side steps now it makes it so much easier getting up here yeah we're good i'm gonna grab some brackets out of here oh yeah uh let me have you seen this yet this is the uh ecoflow wave they're portable air conditioner and i've heard about this thing coming it's their new 400 watt solar panels here grab that it's your shake it's not you know what hold it up that's not too bad for a 400 watt pan it's dual sided so it actually they built it to get uh from the back side reflections off the ground so if you stand it up this way yeah okay and then zip it down the sides and it unfolds yeah fancy pretty slick so dual sided solar panels so i guess not now yeah i guess there's enough energy reflecting off the ground behind it that they they found it worthwhile to really have it both sides like you wouldn't have it laying down flat to do no you have it on an angle right yeah yes yeah this is the ecoflow wave so it's 4 000 btus or 1200 watts of air conditioning um it's got a battery attached to the bottom which is supposed to run it for like around eight hours you can connect it directly to your oh it's a delta black thing on the bottom yeah so that's detachable here check this out put it put it down okay unhook this which is the power right and then you just pull that down and then slide it forward and then there you go yeah and then it detaches that's the battery yeah so you can attach that directly to your your delta max or whatever has the battery connector on the side of it they have a cable that you can get and solar for charge and it locks into place actually yeah and then boom there you go i mean if you're thinking you're going to buy an air conditioner for your office at home yeah this one is going to do what you need it to do and you can take it camping if you can use it exactly so fire up we good you guys haven't seen now i'm going to try to remember is it c200 uh oh god you made me forget uh c303 c303 the volvo i've showed you guys this before but we're gonna uh get this pulled out because we've got the uh oh not the condor the falcon pro on the top which uh also has a pile of stuff on it first time i met ryan he had this out and this is a swedish military oh this side's locked i'll show you guys i'll show you guys the inside of this it's really cool look at this no luxury in here but manual gearbox big old steering wheel let's try to get in here oh it's hard to do with a camera you got one handle here you got a windshield frame it's like driving a truck man this thing is crazy the visibility though yeah like you can see literally right in front of you so no luxuries in here no no power steering manual gearbox look at the switches in here what is it what is a backs back oh it's a back axle okay and a fram axle yeah the frame axles and the dip axle the diff spar that's your four wheel drive push button the frame julius this is drift button right here drift that's your four wheel drive trip so that's what you do in a high centered you know eight and a half foot tall tracking director look at this thing back here guys that's awesome is that a stretcher you lower this down and you uh have a nice nice uh it's like a water bed but it's on tie straps it's a it's an air bed all right let's get this pulled around and then we'll show you guys some of this tents rev it up yeah that's all i did you need that kind of rpm just to make it move it idle front yard off-roading [Laughter] dude that must have felt really uncomfortable everything in this thing feels really good you went through the ditch thought i was gonna put it on side all right let's talk about rooftop tents so we've got three models here we've got the falcon pro which is a wedge style tent here on the volvo we've got the uh we've got the condor overland uh which is a flip open style tent we'll show you that and then we have the sparrow which is a pop-up straight up tent let's start with the wedge tent these are all great options there's things you just want to be mindful or think about if you're trying to figure out which style of tent the wedge you know one of the benefits to it is if you have access issues on your vehicle like this one that's eight and a half feet in the air you don't want to be getting all the way around the thing to unbuckle or undo things you want as easy as you can and the wedge is probably the easiest style of tent to open but i agree with what ryan's saying here with the wedge saw hands down my opinion is the wedge is the fastest most straightforward quickest open tent this is definitely the highest vehicle here all you got to do is what get on the back exactly and flip this up and you know things to consider with that and we'll pop this open in a second this is going to take up the whole roof of your vehicle and that was one of the things that i kind of wanted to change out when we swapped from my pop-up style tent to the flip open style 10 is i wanted extra space on the roof for cargo boxes and gear because i needed and wanted to get some stuff out of my vehicle but look at this ryan's popping this open and that's it and you've got a bike and a surfboard on here i mean you're the ultimate adventure set up here most roof racks most are rated to around 165 pounds that's dynamic weight rating so what that means is when you're on the road and you're traveling and you're gonna hit the brakes or be off-road actually most roof racks actually lower the limit for off-road um that's your that's your moving capacity your static is way higher than that so you know this is a heavy tent this is actually a 180 pound tent because it's got so much material in it that's the heaviest one here isn't it because the condor overland is right i think it's 165 on this truck we have a factory or sorry a custom roof rack that's bolted right into the roof we've got a three bar system we've done everything we can to add more capacity to it the tent itself i believe is actually rated for about a hundred and fifty pounds weight closed and it might be 75 pounds weight open and and because it is a wedge right where if you have a pop-up then it's got the struts have to support all of the weight and that's going to change your weight capacity and the sparrow which we'll show you in a sec it has the adventure model which does have roof racks in it as well but you're right exactly it now has to support all of that going up this is the pro model so we have a tiny bit more set up to do if this was the standard falcon you'd be done right uh but it still will show extra minute or so and once you're up yeah you're gonna climb up there anyways so i put it on the side so i still have access to the tailgate which is another nice thing about the wedge is you can access from the rear you can access from the side a lot of versatility yeah i like that you can access it through the back and so if you're on a four-door vehicle you may not want your ladder overhanging your doors and so that was something else to consider we'll talk about that with the pop-up style tent but you have less versatility in where you put your ladder where now i've got my ladder further away and i'll show you with the flip open um i've got the ladder further away so the doors don't get impeded at all but you know kind of plan for the big picture what's your total build going to look like this one there you go you can climb up on this side you can have a big bat wing style 270 degree awning which roofness makes a wide awning they make a wide awning and self-supporting wide awning with integrated light here's something else to think about and this isn't necessarily unique to any specific model but some of the new ladders that are coming out are actually coming out with the rungs on them with a slight angle to them so this is something that's really nice on the feet climbing in and out now it just depends on what sort of rake you have your ladder at but if your ladder doesn't have these rotated steps and they're flat then you're basically walking up on an angle as you're climbing in the tent and so it is yeah if you're flip-flops or bare feet now you've got quite a footprint of space in here i'm gonna climb right in here here's something with the wedge style tent which is great is you have a ton of height like i'm sitting up i'm just sitting on this but i could get in here and kneel and still not hit the roof it's a little easier for getting dressed in the morning moving your gear around but you know you're limited to the width of your vehicle because this doesn't you know it can't overhang the sides of your vehicle and you do have a lower side where the wedge comes up you can put like your ipad up here and watch a movie if the weather's bad and you're going to bed early in this style you've got a nice view out the top so with the wedge even though it's a wedge style you'd still get a a sunlight or sunroof on it pop this open and uh see out the side here boom there you go and you can you know drop gear down fire gear out whatever and the last thing i wanted to touch on is storing stuff inside of your tent so you may or may not want to store your sleeping bags or bedding or pillows inside of the tent now certain different tents will have different thickness of mattresses and overall height and profile that will kind of dictate how much space you have in them but generally the wedge styles and the pop-up styles are going to have a bit more room in them so a bit more height you can actually store some bedding and other stuff and i'll show you when we pop open the condor overland there really isn't a lot of space to store stuff in there because of the way it folds so something to think about if you have to store stuff inside of your tent back to the jeep now you guys have seen this tent if you've been watching my videos we took this down to death valley so this is the condor overland now this is a flip open style tent and we've got to jump up and down twice on this to undo the latches but with with the way that roof nest has developed it you can actually take these latches and put them on the side which i'm gonna do after this these latches are super easy to undo on roof nests set up but basically like ryan's doing we just pop the tent up and the shell pops up and the roof pops up and then from your angle there this is something to note and this is on all of the condor series that roof goes almost vertical which is something i haven't seen before and when you get in the tent that gives you a ton of headroom and a ton more space in the tent something i noticed when sleeping in this what i really liked is having the hard back wall behind me because when i wanted to go and kind of hang out in my tent a little bit before i went to bed you can sit and lean against that and it has a nice it's a nice backstop and if it was more of an angle you wouldn't be able to do that exactly so it goes up vertical enough and then you're actually gaining a bit of length because of the 10 inch lid also serves as a bit of a platform inside the tent so we just watched ryan pop this open you saw how quick and easy that is to set up now with all of these they have some little awnings on them and you can grab the awning bars or rails or whatever we call them and you have to the pulp pull the awning poles but we do need to set them up on the uh awning to over the door because you don't have to do the windows yeah but you got to do that uh yeah you want to do this because well you have to do this to get in and out you don't have to do the sides but i did notice when we had some windy nights you want to put the poles in those to keep those taut and not be flapping all night long but i slept in this thing in a crazy wind and snow storm on my way down to death valley and it was great like i was like the jeep was rocking it was so windy and uh you know it's not going to pop close on you or anything like that so ladder storage that's something we definitely should talk about now with the flip open style we've got the ladder that uh stores inside of it with the wedge style you can also store the ladder inside of it but if you put too much stuff inside there like bedding and sleeping bags you're not going to be able to get it closed with the ladder there is a small caveat to that and that is on the pro i don't know if it's the only wedge style but it's one of the few or one of the new ones that has a little bit more height allowing you to put the ladder in the standard falcon it is a bit narrower which a lot of people need to get into garages and what have you but you can't put the ladder in but you get a really narrow if you need to put the ladder in and i you know guys i suggest putting your ladder inside your tent if you can because it just saves trying to carry it around inside your vehicle definitely make sure that your tent can do that and if you want to put bedding inside the tent with it make sure that you have enough height uh with your rooftop tent and if you want one of the ultra slim rooftop tents i know like the guys that are epic have some really low profile ones you can't put the ladders in those at all but they're they're like this tall they're super super low profile so the other thing with the flip open style tent that i like so if you need an instant dry space as soon as you get your tent open you've now got somewhere you can stand plus you can open your door get some of your gear out and it's not gonna be getting soaking wet in the rain so and you can put some lights under here and mount it underneath and now you have a nice little dry lit space you get into camp it's dark out already it's pouring rain and you can kind of set up and honestly if you didn't want to set up your awning and you wanted to just quickly cook dinner you could hide under here and pull out your stove and cook dinner so if you want that if you're camping a lot of you know crappy weather flip open has a couple other advantages and an instant dry space is one of them things you want to say about the inside or sleeping in this um you know what this is probably the narrowest of the roof nest lineup and models but again you know i've seen narrow tents like this and because you have so much head space and so many windows it still feels open it doesn't feel like you're climbing into a little cave you know what i found because i switched from a pop-up style tent to this style tent i still feel like there's more width in this style because it goes right to the edges the way that they've designed this with the lid right the tent occupies so much of that footprint inside you're barely losing any to the shell and the outside closing on it something we'll see on the sparrow because all that hardware is inside you have a lot less space in there yeah yeah we'll show let's go inside i'll put my drink down the uh the footprint of this pretty much goes edge to edge bare you know there's barely any difference from the outside of the tent to the inside of the tent so something with the flip open style tent is you have to be able to close the tent so we're sitting in here um and the mattress needs to stack on top of the other mattress so you generally don't see as thick of a mattress as you would with the falcon pro it has a memory foam it's like quite a thick and much softer mattress this one i found was a little bit firm but if you're looking at roof nest they do have some other solutions um they have their feather beds which i'm gonna be taking a look at firing in here which are basically like self-inflating air and foam beds that you can pack up by just releasing the air valve and they inflate by opening the air valve there's plenty of room for two people in here in my opinion i don't think i would have any more people in here it's going to be getting pretty tight but for a single one person camping in here i had tons of room i had my jackery up here i had you know my tablet up here watching movies in the evening so this is what i was talking about if you want to come in here and sit down you can sit down and lean against this back wall it's a little bit angled in but honestly like you come in here and sit down uh it's great to be able to put your pillow up against something where if you're in the wedge style tent like this out window you don't really have anything to lean against on the back wall so you don't get a view of all four sides obviously you've got the back wall we've got the skylight up here which is great i honestly would trade having windows on all four sides for having the skylight and that was something for me with the pop-up style tent felt a bit more claustrophobic is not being able to see out the top um i think this is this is awesome having this i've experienced having tents that don't have a lot of windows or skylights or something in them yeah it is a bit dark and some people really really like the dark they want that i like a more airy open feel i like if the weather's not great to be able to hang out in here and you talk about the space and you sitting up against that back wall compared to the wedge again that wedge you lose so much interior space where in here in probably a similar footprint when it's open i can come all the way down to the end here and you know ryan's way down there yeah exactly and you've got all this space in the middle so the you the usable space inside of the flip open style 10 is greater than the wedge style tent and uh you get this extra bit of room down the end because of the lid having to flip open but we didn't really talk about the materials so falcon pro has the blackout right does have the blackout that's something that some people really like and so something to consider with blackout is if you love to sleep in that's your jam take the blackout the the last tent i had was super dark and you couldn't even tell that the sun had started coming out until it was quite late in the morning and i honestly didn't like that i like i sleep with my blinds open at home in our bedroom i like the morning sun getting me going waking me up in the morning and even though this one isn't a blackout tent this material isn't black out when i slept in this i still didn't know that the sun had already started coming out like this is still quite dark in here for not being blackout but being able to have the skylight and leaving that open getting good ventilation all night long and you'll be able to see that it's morning and you get some nice fresh sunlight plus you can see what kind of weather is is it sunny is it cloudy or is it overcast and raining and also when it comes to talking about fabric just a couple of stats to consider and this goes with all roof nest tents but this fabric is a 3000 mm water resistant so that's basically like a gore-tex jacket so that what that means is it means if you held this fabric like a bowl and you poured water in it you could put 3000 millimeters of water before it's actually going to start dripping through so you should stay dry all of these stitches they all seam sealed you know pretty pretty weather things to look out for though right these are features in the roof nest tents but these are things you want to look for in if you're not going to get a roof nest tent um you know this video isn't about buying roof nest tents this is about the different styles and things to look for in hard shell tents make sure you're looking at that you have the right weather resistance that you need for the things you're gonna be doing you know make sure you've got all those boxes checked and uh you're not getting out there and realizing you bought the wrong tent well you mentioned even about the fabric or the mattress um something that i never realized until i started paying attention was the difference between uh memory foam and high density foam uh way more comfortable excuse me that's what you experienced here this is high density where in the pro it's memory and you can notice the difference yeah i would love to see a memory foam mattress in this tent because i think this would be the perfect ten the only thing that i you know and we won't get into reviewing tens too much but i would love to see a memory foam instead of a high-density foam mattress in this tent and uh maybe we will maybe we will our products are evolving okay let's pop over to the pop over to the power wagon and we're gonna take a look at the sparrow which is a pop-up straight style tent because i've used a pop-up style 10 you know and you've got i think a couple things you want to talk about but we can see it right away with accessing the latches on the pop-up style tent they have latches all around that's exactly what i was just gonna say so right here on this truck now if you if i had a low set on this uh on this truck getting into those latches in here would be very very difficult already it's kind of difficult it's easy to open up but it's a lot harder to get it closed because trying to lower this and we'll show you that maybe later it is a bit difficult it's one downfall with this one to consider yeah and while ryan opens this up that was something that i found as a challenge and even why i want to put the latches on the flip uh flip up style tent on the sides when i had my pop-up style tent it was really hard to get to the latches that were over top of the front windshield and if you don't have good step ups on the side of your vehicle it's a real pain the other thing is you've got a lot of latches you have to do now this one looks like you've got two on the front two on the back and one on each side so something to consider though is um you know ryan is like eight feet tall and he can reach all of the latches from the ground wow that one does go up really quick and easy that's pretty cool now our ladder is inside the tent yeah and back to the latches really quick when you've got it on a taller vehicle the more latches you have to do the more times you've got to climb up and down to open up and close the tent and i found it more of a challenge when i was closing the tent right because you're trying to get the tent material stuffed in around the edges you're up and down to do that then you got to go all the way around the vehicle and do the latches and you usually have to do them in a bit of a sequence so if you've got a really tall vehicle the less you have to climb up and down it to get it unlatched and open the better you just have to put your skirt down here so that no water because it's oh that's cool so you pull the skirt down keep your zipper and everything dry you don't have to put your uh spring poles in this one which we do on all the other tents like it is so easy to set up but it is a bit more difficult to close uh but if you were coming up to camp at night yep i don't think you get an easier one than this yeah and that's you know something that i found in in all of the nights that we've spent camping do you want your tent to close up fast or do you want it to open fast and my personal preference is i want to close my tent as fast as possible and i think the flip open style is very quick i thought it was i think it's faster than the pop-up style let's have a look inside i i personally haven't been inside uh this style pop-up tent before but let's hop in and have a look at the floor plan and all right so i haven't been in the sparrow yet but uh this is kind of cool you've got the uh cargo bin above us so you can actually put some stuff up here and utilize some of this upper space now we we don't have as much head height but i'm six foot two and i'm sitting in here fairly comfortable i think though that the um i think the condor overland is wider this is the small version of this tent there is an xl version as well that's something to consider right like most of these tents uh at least this pop-up style have different widths usually it's like a 48 49 and then like a 55 somewhere in there type of width and you want to be mindful of this style tent because well this version the roof nest version has the lifting struts inside of the tent the one i had before had them outside of the tent but if it's inside it's going to keep a smaller outer footprint and keeps things from snagging if you're out you know off-roading in some of the crazy bushed off trees and like that a little bit more rough off-roading you're gonna have a nice sleek outer profile but you're gonna lose a little bit of your uh floor space to the struts inside of here yeah and you know um another thing about space is the sparrow style is probably one of the best tents for being able to keep gear inside the tent so you can pretty much leave everything in this guy close it up if you look at the roof we've got the indent for the storage bag but it raises where you are there yep you can get a ton of gear in here and close it up now the other thing i want to talk about that we didn't really is condensation mats so this is something to consider depending on the style of tint but especially if you have a hard solid bottom on your tent so some of the tents have a material bottom which might i might add can ripple and flap in the wind my preference is a hard shell bottom because it's more streamlined more aerodynamic less wind noise when you're driving but it's more susceptible to condensation and uh if you don't have good ventilation and you have your tent completely closed up it will get condensation in it and one of the places in conversation is underneath the mattress and so they make these condensation mats to allow some airflow underneath the mattress and to pass underneath it and reduce the amount of moisture that's under there and subsequently prevent any mold or mildew being built up on there there's also a bit of insulation factor a lot of times if you're on a mattress that's right on the base of a tent if you have a tent that is aluminum that is foam-filled base which is common in a lot of tents that actually has very little insulation value and so you just feel cold and you create a lot of condensation because your warm body and that cold air on the other side comes through uh when you get that space this one has a little bit of fabric which is going to give you some insulation this is going to keep you off the base and give you some insulation plus your mattress you're going to be a lot warmer and your you yourself will create a lot less condensation rooftop tents especially hard shell tents if you have one that is good quality and you want to move on or maybe upgrade to a new model you have a pretty good residual value in a lot of these tents from some of the bigger reputable brands that have been around a while you know their quality over several years because they've made these tents for a long time and you can get a lot of your money back so you may be outlaying you know three four five thousand dollars for one of these tents but you get to experience all of the benefits and features of using a hard shell rooftop tent and then when you're ready to move on switch to a new model or maybe you're just done camping with rooftop tents you can get a lot of your money back if you keep it in good condition and it's a quality tent if you're local to the vancouver area come check out module racks they've got tons of stuff in stock but they also have their website modularracks.com is yourwebsite.com or ca dot com modular it's modula not modular modularracks.com uh go check it i'll put a link down in the description below if you're in the lower mainland vancouver area stop by come say hi to ryan and the crew and they will take good care of

Channel: Casey 250

Views: 353,489

Keywords: casey 250, jeep, offroad, 4x4, jeep jk, jeep jl, jeep gladiator, roof top tent, roof top tent 2022, hard shell tent, roof nest, buyers guide, condor overland, falcon pro, sparrow, buying a roof top tent, camping, camping tents, overlanding, overland, jeep overland, overland tents, off-road tents, roof top tent camping, rooftop tent, roof top tent review, car camping, overland tent, best roof top tent

Id: mSdalniPR3s

Length: 28min 27sec (1707 seconds)

Published: Sun May 29 2022