Hi!
We were out in the New Year’s Eve with my wife with a “hot tent” teepee style with a wood stove. But we were a bit miserable during the night in -25 C (-13 F) and it got me thinking how to be more comfy in a wood heated hot tent during the night.
My problem I try to solve is as follows: Use a hot tent that is spacious for cozy sitting by the wood stove and for the night find out a way to heat the tent safely to raise the sleeping temperature to plus celsius degrees (at least +5 C 41 F) if the weather outside is -20C. Our transporting equipment is snow shoes with both having ice fishing sled (XL size) to haul the gear for two nights in around 5km from the car without too much trouble. Our wood stove from Helsport burns 2 40litres sacks of birch so for two nights we need 4 or them which makes the other sled full. This means our rest of the equipment should be fitting to the other sled. Now we are using a polycotton teepee and the Helsport stove but these take up too much space. We would need to cut the space required for tent and stove to be about half of these. So there would be half space left in the other sled. So collapsible stove and a nylon teepee or some other hot tent is most likely required. Basically now we used 3 sleds full of gear and would need to cut it to 2 sleds.
Firstly, I think that a teepee style tent (or “kota” in Finnish or “lavvo” in Swedish) is made for the high winds and open fire inside. But it’s not originally invented to be used with a stove. With a stove the heat is mostly high up (normally needed for the smoke from the open fire). Secondly, when we go to bed the space is so big that our body temperature does not warm it at all and again most heat is up high.
So I was thinking that the shelter should be more of a Kifaru Sawtooth kind of shape where the sleeping area is not so tall but I think it should have a liner and a fabric wall separating the sleeping area from the rest of the shelter so that the body heat would not escape that much. So it also could be some kind of tunnel shape. But we need standing area around the stove. Again another idea would have a small two-person tent inside the teepee. And what if it would have an insulated outer fabric. I can see there are such tents available but could be fairly easily DIY’d with some insulation material (not necessarily expensive down though).
One other idea was to use a small propane heater inside for the night. But that makes me really worry about the safety. I even had ideas where you would use something like Mr. Buddy heater on low setting and use the stove fan on top of it AND use some kind of funnel and a pipe to get the warmth safely to the insulated tent inside the teepee. Heater would remain in the big space of the teepee surrounded by some fireproof cloth.
But these propane heaters require a lot of propane/butane and put up quite a bit of BTUs. Lowest I found was catalytic heater from Coleman called Sport Cat (discontinued). It put up only about 1000 BTUs which might be enough if funnelled somehow inside the insulated tent.
Had a thought also of diesel heaters and electric blankets but they require big batteries. These are well tested here in Finland for ice fishing basecamp trips for some people who come with snowmobiles. But this is not an option for us.
Any ideas or comments?
