Coleman Instant Setup Weatherproof Camping Tent

Tents come in many shapes and sizes, each have their positives, and their negatives. Some tents are cheap, while other’s, really expensive. The best tent for you, is going to depend on what you need from a tent, and how much money you are willing to spend. Most people who like to camp in the summer time, will probably be satisfied with a tent like this one. While other’s who camp in extreme cold temperatures, might be inclined to go with one of those super thermal padded tents.

PACKAGING: Coleman loves to double pack these tents. When you receive your package, and open it up, it reveals the Coleman bag as seen in photo 1. If you unzip the Coleman bag, it reveals another box! Once you open up that box, finally, you will be able to pull your tent out of the box to begin deploying.

DIMENSIONS: The dimensions of the tent are, 10 feet long, by 9 feet wide, and 6 feet tall. I chose a tent this big because I wanted enough space. However, they always overstate a tents capacity. It may fit up to 6 small children. But in reality, this tent can only house up to 4-adults, and up to 2-adults comfortably.

PITCHING: Pitching the tent, is not as quick as the company says, which should be no surprise to no one. If you had 2-people working together, you could perhaps do it in 60-seconds. However, I pitched it all by myself, and it took closer to 2-minutes. When you compare this design to a dome tent however, you will take much longer to set one of those up. All you have to do, is stand the spider column (as I call it) upright, then unfold each leg, until the tent is flat on the ground. Then begin extending each leg of the tent, until the button snaps through the slots. Again, it will be a bit cumbersome for 1-person to do, however, still faster then setting up a dome tent.

Once the tent is pitched, and you’ve stretched all the legs outward, then begin setting up your guidelines. If your tent is on earth, you can use the included stakes they give you, to stake the tent down using the guidelines. Additionally, if you plan to camp on days where it will be raining, you really need to waterproof the tent with the optional rainfly accessory, model 2000010331. The rainfly is nearly impossible to put on, via 1-person, once the tent has been pitched up. I recommend 2-people to install the rainfly. The rainfly secures to the tent via plastic C-clips. And the rainfly comes with its own stakes and guidelines, to secure to the earth.

INGRESS: The tent has only 1-entry point, the front door. And unlike most tents, which the door spans the entire front half of the tent, this tent’s door, only opens 1/2 of the front opening. I would have liked to have seen the full width being used. There are instant popup tents that are larger in size, that do use full width doors. As typical with all tents, it is double zippered, so you can close and open it from within.

WINDOWS: This tent is fully loaded when it comes to windows! There is literally windows on every side of this tent, all of them have 2-zippers per window. Each window has a mesh screen to keep bugs out, and each can be rolled down and secured with the knobs they provide. The reason they didn’t use the full width for the door, is because they wanted to put a window next to the door as well. So rest assured, if your camping in the summer time, you are going to get plenty of ventilation.

VENTS: Now this is where I can be a bit nit picky when it comes to vent locations. On larger tents, they often put the vents close to the bottom of the tents, usually located in the back, or on the sides of the tent. But they chose to put the vents on the top of the tent on this model. I guess if your camping in the summer time, since heat rises, having them on the top makes sense. But if your camping in the winter time, its only going to let all the heat out. And if your running propane heaters, such as the buddy heater, you really want it to intake air from the bottom of your tent. Also, if you close the vents, there is still no way to make them seal in their closed position, so they will still vent when you don’t want them to. The vents also come with zipper meshes, as well as the velcro strap that keeps them open.

MATERIAL: The materials that this tent consist of, 150D Polyester, and Taffeta 150D. They use taped seams, inverted welded seams, and use rugged polyguard. I’m not an expert on tents, so I can’t tell you the values of these materials, or how they are constructed. What I can tell you, is that no integrated weathertek system is going to completely waterproof the tent without the rainfly accessory. However, for a super light sprinkle, you can get away with it.

For the most part, this tent feels like quality to me. A lot of times, companies will cheap out on the zippers, but these ones seem pretty good. The material makeup of the tent seems fairly solid, and the aluminum legs also seem pretty good. The spider column was fairly easy to work with when setting up the tent, so I think it is durable enough as well. Do I think the materials would hold up in winds up to 50MPH or more? No, absolutely not! But who’s camping in stormy winds?

ACCESSORIES: The tent comes with several accessory points that I like. Outside the tent above the door, there is a loop where you can hang a lantern, mosquito repellent, etc. Inside the tent are two mesh pockets, one close to the door on the side of the tent, and the other on the back half of the tent, on the other side. These mesh pockets can be used to store cell phones, keys, lighters, emergency supplies, pretty much anything you need small pockets for. The tent also comes equipped with a lantern hanger. But if your lantern only has a handle instead of a hook, you will need to use a carabeener to attach to the lantern hanger.

EXPERIENCE: Most of you are going to use a tent to go camping. While I would love to go camping personally, I no longer have a vehicle, so I have no access to camping sites. Instead, I am thinking outside the box, and solving a problem I have. I lease my workshop, therefor I do not own the building. When you are leasing, its illegal for the renter to make changes to the building, its up to the person who owns the building to do that. The sheet metal roof of my workshop leaks when it rains. When it snows heavy, snow also falls in from the ridge cap. And since my shop is not insulated, it gets mighty cold in there during the winter time, there is just no way to heat it.

NOTE: Absent T land owners are not fun. They don’t consider you important, and they refuse to fix problems. But they love to go numerous vacations every year all over the world, with the money they make from your rent payments. Capitalism at work fellas.

To solve this issue, I bought this tent, I knew that it would solve two problems for me. First, keep the rain off of my most important machines, and provide heat to keep the freezing cold at bay. Also, I wanted a space where I could do work in warmer temps. As you can see from the pictures, the tent fits the available space I have in the shop quite well. I ran an electrical cord up through the top vent, so that I can have power to run a light, space heater, and a charger.

I used a 32-WATT LED worklight as my light source, I just used a small bungee cord wrapped around the light’s frame several times, then put both the hooks onto the lantern hanger attachment. While it may be crude, it works, and thats all that counts. I run the space heater on low, its set to 65 degrees F, and it oscillates to move the heat around. When I am not working in the tent, I store my 2-best mowers inside, and a scooter. The mower closest to the camera, I actually bought on Amazon!

I use an outdoor wireless thermometer to monitor the temp inside the tent, thats how I dialed in the heater. Also, to protect the tent floor from tearing, as I am moving heavy equipment in and out of it, I chose to line the floor with cardboard, and taped the cardboard together. And since I unfortunately do not have carpet material, I chose to just staple some blankets to the cardboard. If anybody has any knowledge on where I can get carpet to line this square footage on the cheap, please let me know.

When the temperature is in the 30’s, I am able to maintain 54 degrees F with the heater on low. (750-WATTS) When the temperature is in the 40’s, I am able to maintain 60 degrees F. If I through the heater on high, (1500-WATTS) I could easily hit the mark of 65 degrees F while its in the 30’s out there. But I don’t want to use that much power on my bill, so I chose not to. For those of you who plan to use a propane buddy heater, make sure your vent is open, otherwise you will burn up all your oxygen and become asphyxiated. A propane heater generally puts out more BTU’s of heating power, but at a price of consuming propane.

CONCLUSION: I am known to do things in unique ways, and this tent is no exception. While this tent is a very simple solution to a larger problem, it is both cost effective, ingenuitive, and it just works for me. Nobody can wait on absent t owners to handle things. And there was no way I was going to spend 1000 dollars of my own money to insulate the workshop and fix the roof leaks. I really love my tent, it works really well, and I think you will love it too, if you choose to buy it. Despite a few of my nit picks, I am going to give this a solid 5 out of 5 stars!

I opted for this tent because the overall consensus was how very easy it is to put up. Yes, it really is very, VERY easy to erect. We are a family of scientific/engineering types, so not the very least likely to succeed with putting up a tent, but we are also not very advanced campers. With some experience (less than one camping trip per year) but not a lot, we found this tent to be super easy to put up, even with 5 and 8 year old children distracting us in the process.

We used it a couple of times in the backyard first. No real problems there (except a nervous preschooler who decided to “go back home”/inside before 9pm.) When we were planning a class camping trip with other families, I warned my husband, “the reviews say this tent is great, EXCEPT IN THE RAIN” so we planned to just pack up early and leave if the weather turned bad.

Well, living in New England… we got a pretty intense thunderstorm during our three night camping trip! The shelter over the picnic tables was leaking. One (out of five) families just packed it in and left at dusk when their tent started to flood. The weather reports the next day actually stated flash floods occurred in the area where we camped… but we slept pretty darn dry in the Coleman 6-Person Instant Tent! I would say there were two very tiny spots of water infiltration from above. We definitely had one child who rolled to the side and got a damp sleeping bag due to sleeping in contact with the side of the tent. HOWEVER, even without the rainfly and with no tarp covering us, all in all, we had a dry tent. This far exceeded my expectation for how well this inexpensive, easy-up tent would handle serious rainfall. (It POURED in the evening, then rained softly to moderately throughout most of the night.)

We did luck out, by arriving last in our group, in having the highest placed campsite at our New Hampshire state park. The coziest seeming sites were definitely downhill from ours when the weather turned bad. The site did seem pretty flat upon initial visual inspection, though. The soil was sandy, so the rain water was able to sink it fairly quickly, thank goodness.

Aside from weather resistance, our family of four found the interior space of this tent comfortable. We use the self-inflating (backpacker style) camping pads by Therm-A-Rest (Thermarest Luxury Map Air Mattress, Blue in the 30-inch wide XL size for the adults and much smaller 3/4 length pads for the kids), so we aren’t crowding the tent as much as household sized thick air mattresses would. It was snug but comfortable with our beds deployed and a few duffle bags with clothing. We had room to move between our beds, but we only use the tent to sleep and get dressed.

Having read all the reviews, I brought a few wooden clothes pins to use to keep the window flaps from flapping, and I had zero issue with any noise or inconvenience with the windows. I am very easily disturbed by things like fluttering flaps.

As others have written, it sure would be nice to have extra loops or pockets in the tent for storage, but, again, I knew what to expect and just kept a little tote next to my bed with my LED lamp, eyeglasses, etc. At this price point, I found the tent completely satisfactory as far as features were concerned.

I wish there were a footprint sized precisely for this tent. I worried about water infiltration all night during our heavy rains. I was able to fold a standard tarp to fit neatly underneath the Coleman 6-Person Instant Tent, but I would have paid a few extra dollars to have a tarp that fit perfectly like a proper footprint does.

I am pretty likely to buy the new rainfly accessory for this tent now that it is available. As I said, our experience was very positive in a pretty significant rainfall, but I did sleep poorly worrying that water was going to come in during the night. I have also strongly considered some kind of easy up shelter just tossed up over the entire tent to stop the worst of a deluge getting to us…

In a nutshell, I am very satisfied with the Coleman 6-Person Instant Tent. It met my highest priority, which was a set-up so easy that tent-anxiety wouldn’t keep us from heading out for a camping trip. The five-star review is because FOR THE PRICE, this tent wildly exceeded my expectations. I would be using much more stringent requirements (pockets, conveniences) if the price point were more than just barely into the three digit range, like the Paha Que, Mountain Hardware, etc. tents that I covet but could not justify for our infrequent current usage. This is a great place to start if you are a family considering camping but not ready for big cash commitments. In that scenario, IMHO, spend less on your first tent and a little more to ensure you have good sleeping pads (cushioning) to avoid physical pain/misery, warm enough sleeping bags, and good basic cooking equipment so everyone can enjoy themselves.

暑い中、テントを立てるのが嫌な私達夫婦は2個目のテントにこれを選びました。
あっという間に建てられ撤収もあっという間！最高！

Really cool easy to setup fine not tested in rains but good product .my family loves it