Owners describe the problem as time, and it is really weight

Canadian camping runs from the long weekend in May to the end of September, and a great deal of gear gets used far less than it was meant to. An electric rooftop tent mount addresses the reason, which is not the tent itself but the twenty minutes at each end of the trip.

A hardshell tent on a rooftop tent mount weighs somewhere between sixty and eighty kilograms. That is not a load one person lifts overhead onto a vehicle, and it is awkward enough that two people have to coordinate a lift that neither of them can pause partway through.

How to remove a rooftop tent alone is the question that decides everything

The traditional answers for a rooftop tent mount are all workarounds. A ceiling hoist means the tent only comes off in one garage, a pulley on a beam means the same, and lifting it with a helper means the trip depends on somebody else being available on a Friday evening.

None of those problems are about camping. They decide whether the tent goes on for a single trip or stays mounted all season, and a tent left mounted all season is one that costs fuel every day it is not being slept in.

A mounted tent is a load the vehicle carries whether or not it is used

Anything on a roof or a rack sits in clean air and produces drag out of proportion to its size. Fuel consumption rises noticeably at highway speed, and the effect is constant, so a tent carried through August for two weekends of use is paid for every commute in between.

Height is the other constant. A vehicle with a tent on it no longer fits some garages, drive throughs, and parking structures, and the driver has to remember that on every trip rather than only on the ones that involve camping.

Powered lifting turns an event into a five minute job

An electric rooftop tent mount raises and lowers the tent under its own power, so one person operates a switch rather than taking a load. The tent comes off in the driveway on a Sunday evening and goes back on when it is next wanted.

Systems divide by what has to be lifted

• Manual, two people: no cost, needs a helper
• Ceiling hoist: one person, only in that garage
• Powered mount: one person, anywhere the vehicle is

Where a powered system pays and where it does not

• Strength: mounting stops being a scheduling problem
• Strength: no fuel penalty between trips
• Limit: added hardware and weight on the vehicle
• Limit: still needs somewhere to set the tent down

Weighed against lifting by hand, a rooftop tent mount for a pickup costs the price of the mechanism and returns a tent that gets used on short notice. A camper near Kelowna reports the change was going from four trips a season to nearly every weekend.

Outdoor gear is increasingly judged on the setup rather than the use

Buyers now weigh how much effort stands between the vehicle and being ready to leave, having found that equipment which takes an hour to prepare is equipment that stays where it is on most of the weekends it was bought for.

That focus on getting out the door is why the outdoor equipment TMG Industrial supplies is built around how quickly it goes on and comes off rather than around what it does once it is fitted.