Insulated Tents for Troops

In todays blog I'm going to talk about the T word. Yes I said it the T word. I don't understand why the hippies and the tree hugging green thinkers aren't talking T either but I am, and I'm here to talk about "TENTS!" Tents are for some reason considered TEMPORARY!!! But, I'm here to say that they're not. The tents that are used in Iraq today are the same old crappy tents used in in WWII, they packed them up put them in storage and dug them out and reused them again for todays war. Now, If that shows you how well a tent can hold up to the elements and time, lets face it they are in a war zone with weekly mortar attacks and still standing. Thats more then I can say about those California homes and a landslide. If you want to go green and cheap, and have a home that can be built in a day and will outlast a terrorist attack we need to start building permanent tent structures. Now the way we do that is by adding insulation.

So what are these tents with insulation anyway? Well, I talked about them on my CLS day 1 blog, but what exactly are they? To start you off these things are COOL! I personally have spent two days in one and I will tell you from first hand experience that they are comfortable to be in. The biggest thing thats so noticeable about them is the warmth immediately as you enter inside. Now granted if you leave the door open some lengthiness duration of time the stored heat escapes and is definitely noticeably cooler in the room after about an hour worths. So what happens when you leave the space idle and doors closed well lets just say they retain an incredible amount of heat. Now, I went on a little journey today and checked out the smaller 12 man tents they got set up around the FOB. The tents from the outside appear to be really small, small as in one bedroom house small. These tents fit comfortably and in an open barracks fashion 6 bunkbeds and allow a decent sized walkway between them. The major difference I noticed was that it appeared to be a little bit colder in there, then I checked the A/C unit and discovered it was turned off, so the tent by itself with no lights on was keeping all that cold air from getting in, the A/C unit must be for the heat...or is it? Going back to what I said earlier about the differences, well lets just say the moment I stepped in I heared nothing, no noise from outside, no A/C units running, it was dead quite in there. As a prior US soldier who was out in Iraq, our tents did not have this foam sprayed on them, and you could hear everything, the helicopters would pass every half hour or so, the generators could be heard off in the distance, as people would pass by you could hear their full conversations, and the biggest problem of all is the wind. The wind would scare the living daylights out of me at night because the tents walls would smack me in the face if we got a big gust and the ceiling would act like it was about the be torn open by T-rex. I really noticed a major difference between these tents and the ones I had to endure in memories past.

I checked the firmness of the tent walls and it was a little springy as I pushed against it, but nothing that a kick or jab would do any damage to. My point in all of this is to show how comfortable the envirnment is to the soldier in Iraq now. His exposure to the outside conflict has been greatly reduced by having one of these insulated.

Now, what is this foam and how do they do it and how much does it cost or save? The foam is called polyurethane (PU) foam. Its the same stuff you can buy in a can for about 3 bucks at Lowes. Now PU is very strong and insulative, once applied it mimics the insulation properties of a regular house and conforms to the tents shape and strengthens the lose fabric. Now the foam is sprayed on 2in thick all the way around on everything, poles, fabric, A/C vents and ducts, you name it. The exception is the doors and the inside which remained untouched. The foam cures in about 20 minutes and must be sprayed again with two coats of Acrylic weather paint. The Acrylic paint cakes into the crevaces of the foam and mimics painted plaster at this point. The whole process can be done to a regular camping tent for under $500 if you are interested. I myself am shooting a bit bigger then a camping tent and plan to foam a hoop house for its bigger size and shape. The biggest advantage of a rounded roof is the added interior space and strength of the curves. I will eventually be putting one together from scratch and will make a blog about my experience in the future. The whole concept of this is really kind of clever, I like it so much because I know just how cheap and quick it would be to set up a few of these tents on my 5 acres in the desert and live comfortably out of them. The sky is the limit with this approach and should be considered as a valuable alternative to home materials.