Exped Siruis Fly Options

I’ve never quite understood the logic behind tent flame retardency guidelines. I mean if there are no guidelines for the clothing you wear (eVENT seems to be fine as a garment) what difference does it make if your shelter is made of the same material? You will just as likely be wearing the non-flame retardent garment while cooking over your stove as sitting in the shelter. Both would seem to me to be highly subjected to possible fire hazards. The garment would seem to me to be a much higher hazard for getting burned than the shelter because it would be much more difficult to get out of the garment. Either way, shelter or garment, if the blaze gets going you’re going to get roasted.

And even those fabrics that are quoted as being generally “safe” do an awfully good job of going up in smoke. Silnylon is definitely not “pyrophobic”. And yet there has been no ban on it as there has been with eVENT.

I say go with the better, lighter fabric. That being said polyester intrinsically has far better water shedding ability (it doesn’t stretch when wet) and resistance to solar degradation than nylon.

tks for yr comments i thoroughly agree. i also think sometimes we analyse things too much (i do). cheers

Miguel, good point on the cooking in non-flame retardant clothing. What I mean is, I’ve always known of the dangers, but the way you put it, the incongruity of no-eVENT in a shelter large enough to reasonalby cook in vs. it’s ‘ok’ to cook while wearing eVENT (or other non-flame retardant fabrics) reveals how little thought went into such an edict. Often our non-flame retardant insulating layer is closer to the flame of our stoves than the tent, tent fly or vestibule.

If the choice was forced upon me, I’d rather have my shelter go up in flames than my non-flame retardant clothing burn and melt into a solid molten slag burning on and into my skin, needing to be ripped/peeled off and partially debriding me in the process, ripping both burnt or blistered (at the very least), dead flesh, leaving some underlying living, raw, bleeding flesh exposed in the process – not a pretty picture (nor smell) to say the least. [This isn’t to ignore that fact that if the shelter goes up, our clothing may soon follow.]