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Reviews > Do It Yourself > Grangers Tent and Gear Care Kit > Test Report by Andrea Murland

Granger’s Tent + Gear Care Kit
Test Series by Andrea Murland

Initial Report - February 15, 2019
Long Term Report - May 11, 2019

Tester Information

Name: Andrea Murland
Email: amurland AT shaw DOT ca
Age: 33
Location: Elkford, British Columbia, Canada
Gender: Female
Height: 5 ft 2 in (1.57 m)
Weight: 130 lb (59 kg)

I began hiking frequently in 2006 and have since hiked in Western Canada, Australia, Europe, and Nepal. I spend most weekends either day-hiking or on 2-3 day backpacking trips, with some longer trips when I can manage them. I also snowshoe and ski in the winter, and prefer to be hut-based for overnight trips. Elevation is typically 500-3,000 m (1,600-10,000 ft), in the Canadian Rockies and the Selkirk, Purcell, and Monashee ranges. I try for a light pack, but I don’t consider myself a lightweight backpacker.

Initial Report – February 15, 2019

Product Information

Manufacturer: Granger’s International, Ltd.
Manufacturer's URL: www.grangers.co.uk
Year of Manufacture: 2019
MSRP: Not Listed
Volume, Tent + Gear Cleaner: 500 mL (16.9 fl oz)
Volume, Tent + Gear Repel: 500 mL (16.9 fl oz)
Weight, Expanding Sponge: 18 g (0.6 oz)

Description

The Granger’s Tent + Gear Care Kit is a kit for cleaning and restoring water repellency to outdoor gear. The kit contains three components: Tent + Gear Cleaner, Tent + Gear Repel, and a sponge.

The Tent + Gear Cleaner is for use on tents and gear, though the bottle also indicates that it could be used on outdoor furniture. The instructions on the bottle are quite straightforward: wet the fabric to be cleaned, dilute the cleaner 1:50, rub into the areas to be treated with a sponge or soft brush, and rinse. There is a caution to avoid contact with skin and eyes.

The Tent + Gear Repel comes in a spray bottle and is to be used at full strength. The bottle indicates that it adds water repellency while maintaining breathability, as well as protecting against UV. The instructions indicate that it should be used on clean fabric, and that the fabric should be dampened prior to application. The product is to be sprayed on, left for 2-3 minutes, and excess wiped off. Then the gear must be allowed to fully dry prior to packing it away.

The expanding sponge measures 22.6 x 11 x 4 cm (8.9 x 4.3 x 1.6 in) when expanded, though it was thinner while still in the packaging. It’s narrower in the centre, and the packaging describes it as “shaped for comfort and ease of use”.
Kit Contents

Initial Impressions

The instructions for the products seem quite straightforward. I like that a sponge was provided, so I can have a dedicated one just for my gear, and don’t have to go purchase one separately.

My primary target for these products is my 2-person tent. This is an MSR Hubba Hubba, which I purchased in 2009. The 10-year old tent has never had any cleaning done other than to rinse off sand or mud after trips. I use it with a footprint, which has seen the most rinsing. In 2018 I noticed that sections of the floor were often wet inside the tent in the morning, soaked through the footprint and tent floor. I hope that this product will fix it up!
Old Tent

I think that it will be difficult for me to find a place to apply the products through the winter. I can’t do it outside in the cold, and I don’t have a room in my home to do it. Maybe my building’s laundry room…

Summary

The Tent + Gear Care Kit appears to contain everything that I need to clean and renew my old tent and gear. The instructions appear straightforward and easy to follow.

Long Term Report – May 11, 2019

The Treatment

We had an early burst of warm spring in March that lasted a few days before winter re-descended for most of March, April, and into May. I was able to get outside to treat my tent during that window.

I started with the fly of my tent, and had it stretched out over the poles. This seemed to me to be the best way to get it stretched out and that I didn’t miss any of it. I started by wetting the fabric on both the outside and inside of the tent with a wet sponge, removing some surface dirt as I did so. I mixed up full batch of the cleaner in a bucket of warm water, noting that it created some suds in the bucket. I then sponged both sides of the fly with the cleaner, rinsing & re-wetting the sponge frequently. There was definitely cleaning going on beyond what water alone could do, as the water in the bucket got pretty brown and the suds disappeared through the process.
Cleaner in Bucket

Once I had gone over everything with the cleaner, I rinsed out the sponge and bucket and went over everything again with clean water as a rinse. Then it was time to spray on the Repel. I shook the bottle well and then started spraying the inside of the fly. I found that I tended to spray from closer than the instructed 6 in (15 cm), partially because of the awkward position crouched inside the tent, and partially because that seemed to ensure that all of the fabric was covered. From the specified distance, it seemed that a bit of fabric was getting missed. The Repel is a milky white when sprayed on, and formed into beads and droplets shortly after being applied. After spraying the inside and outside of the fly, I used the sponge, well wrung out, to gently wipe over the surfaces to absorb the excess Repel. There was quite a lot of it, and the milky white drops re-formed over the next fifteen minutes or so. The final step was to just leave the fly outside in the sun, staked out on the poles, to dry.
Repel on the tent

I used a whole bottle of Repel for the fly alone, though I did spray both sides of it. The bottle specified that 1 litre (33.8 fl oz) should cover 11-13 m2 (118-140 sq ft) of light nylon, so with a 500 mL (16.9 fl oz) bottle I should have gotten about 6 m2 (65 sq ft). Both sides of my tent fly probably is close to that, though I may have been over-spraying a bit.

The following day was nice again, so I repeated the process with the bathtub floor of my tent, cleaning and then spraying both sides of it. I was thankful that I had a second bottle of Repel, as I had plenty of cleaner to do the job but had used a whole bottle the previous day on the fly.

While my tent floor was drying, I decided to do the cleaning of the tent footprint in my kitchen sink rather than sponging it off while hanging up. I figured that the footprint would be the dirtiest part, and I didn’t really have a good place to string up the footprint with enough tension to do a good sponging job. I put it on the tent poles to spray the Repel onto both sides of it. The spraying process and wiping off the excess went much the same for the tent floor and footprint as it had for the fly.
Tent floor and footprint

Field Use

I took the tent out for a few nights of car camping following the treatment, in the front range of the Canadian Rockies. Temperatures were down to around freezing or just below on all of the nights, with either snow or frost each night at an elevation of around 1400 m (4590 ft).

When my tent got used for the last time in 2018, it picked up a very heavy odour of wood smoke that no amount of airing out had been able to get rid of. I was happy to note that once the tent was cleaned & had the Repel applied that smell was muted considerably (though not gone). This made the tent much nicer to crawl into the first night I used it. However, it didn’t keep odours at bay for long, as April in the foothills means grazing land and mud, so the tent now reminds me of mud and manure in scent.
Snowy morning

My first night out in the tent I was camping on clear but damp ground, but it snowed overnight and got quite chilly. I was expecting plenty of condensation, and I noted that the condensation on the inside of the fly was beaded quite nicely. There was no water soaked through the floor to the inside of the tent, though condensation had made the footprint and outside of the tent floor damp. On subsequent nights I also had a dry tent floor in the morning. I can only conclude that the cleaning and Repel did its job.

Summary

The products in the Tent + Gear Care Kit worked well. The cleaner did exactly that – clean and remove odours. The sponge was easy to use, large enough to be effective, and shows no signs of falling apart. The Repel seems to have improved the waterproofing of my tent and was relatively easy to apply. However, I had quite a lot of cleaner left at the point that I ran out of Repel.

Thumbs Up:
Cleaner removed dirt
Tent smelled better
Waterproofing improved
Sponge worked well

Thumbs Down:
I used a full bottle of Repel long before I used up the bottle of cleaner

Thanks to Granger's International and BackpackGearTest.org for the chance to renew my tent.


Read more reviews of Granger gear
Read more gear reviews by Andrea Murland

Reviews > Do It Yourself > Grangers Tent and Gear Care Kit > Test Report by Andrea Murland



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