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Quite genuinely asking for a friend here.
Her son has just done a walking trip in mid Wales, and one of the nights the tent got wet, while they were camped in a field with sheepshit and the like. It was then packed up damp and has thus developed something of an odour. It's now back at home and has been hung out on the line, hosed down with fresh water and left to airdry for the afternoon. But she still describes it as "Horrendous, stinks of wee". The (nylon, Mountain Hardwear) tent belongs to the son's friend, who wasn't part of the group on the trip.
Any bright ideas on how to de-stinkify it, without ruining the waterproofing, before handing it back? The only sensible advice I can come up with is to leave it to air for a couple of days more in the sunshine, and hope the smell goes away.
Cheers
Buy them a new tent.
Packing it up damp is a real dick move if it was borrowed.
Aha - so there is - NIKWAX Tent & Gear Solarwash. In various different sized bottles from 500ml upwards, by the look of it. Well spotted. That's a good start
Packing it up damp is a real dick move if it was borrowed.
Not really. If it rains in the middle of a multi day walking trip as the OP implies, it's sometimes unavoidable. If it's then aired as soon as practicable, which seems to be the case, then I'm not seeing the "dick move"? More bad luck. Having said all that, if you can't get rid of the smell, buying a new one might still be the right thing to do.
Tents can smell like piss because the PU coating is degrading - due to age and longer term poor storage.. A wet night and a few days in a bag aren't enough to do this, it's a longer term issue. No amount of washing will solve it. Whether that's your problem here, I don't know.
Packing it up damp is a real dick move if it was borrowed.
Not really. If it rains in the middle of a multi day walking trip as the OP implies, it's sometimes unavoidable. If it's then aired as soon as practicable, which seems to be the case, then I'm not seeing the "dick move"? More bad luck. Having said all that, if you can't get rid of the smell, buying a new one might still be the right thing to do.
True, maybe I was being a bit harsh... !
I guess a lot depends on if it was a decent tent or a £60 'Glasto special'
Febreez?
He said it's a Mountain Hardwear so a decent (expensive) brand. Their kit normally lasts for ever so I'd be pretty cheesed off if someone knackered my kit when borrowing it. If that's the case, sounds like replacement and an expensive lesson.
Use it. My tents have smelt a bit rough during wet periods of cycle tours and multiple days of packing up dripping wet. After a few dry days they smell fine again.
Start by pitching it and airing it for a few days. Older tents can stink anyway, but guessing this is just a bit of damp and teenage boy stink? Should air out fine. Shouldn't be any mould from one day packed wet anyway and packing wet always happens on a multi day hike. Unavoidable and not an issue.
Also "Horrendous, stinks of wee" might actually be "slight aroma of old nylon" to someone else.
As above, use nikwax or Grainger's tent wash and proof. Give it as many days airing and properly drying as you can.
I've had tents smell really really bad (like make you gag bad) and revived them to no smell. And that includes kit store of 45 DofE tents being used constantly through a season and regularly barely dry before being reissued...
Edit: I forgot to say that dead midges are THE worst for smelling. Really, really clean them out. They can stain and require a lot more cleaning to prevent mould and real gagging smells. Every little corner of inner and outer.
Thanks all. Gist seems to be to wash it gently, pitch in garden and leave to air dry, ideally in the sun, for a day or three. And hope it airs out.
As far as I can tell from the photo I've seen, it's a Mountain Hardwear Trango with grey and orange flysheet. Not a current model on their website, but they sometimes come up on Ebay and the like if push comes to shove.
Ask the owner what they'd like you to do?
If it were me, I'd rather someone told me that they'd potentially damaged something they'd borrowed rather than exacted some randomly googled fix under their own steam. They might have a preferred cleaning method or even go "yeah, it's been like that for years when it gets wet."