Eezi-Awn Bat 270 Awning

Video Transcript

Intro

Hi, I'm Paul with Equipt Expedition Outfitters. Today, I want to talk to you about the Eezi-Awn Bat 270-degree awning. We have it here on one of our vehicles in our showroom, and I thought I'd go through the whole process of setting it up and putting it away to show you how easy this is.

First of all, let's talk about the awning itself. The Bat body is a 270-degree awning. It is in a bag that is made out of PVC material. It's the same material that the U.S. market uses for tonneau covers on the back of pickup trucks, impervious to the weather, and it's going to last for a very, very long time. They use a YKK zipper to hold the bag together. The back of the awning is an aluminum extrusion that has some T-slots in it. These slots allow you to put the mounting anywhere on the back of that awning, whenever it suits your needs as far as putting it on an SUV, a vehicle, or like we have it set up here. So let's go ahead and open it up.

The Bat awning is 90 inches long with the bag as it sits here, and when we open it up, it shows a great deal of cover. So simple as it to open it up. Now, when we open it up and what was inside here, I just put the back behind here, we've got three clips to go across here: one, two, three. These clips hold all the material in place and allow it to get out of the way, put it back to close up. When we open up those clips, the panels fall down. We have four extrusions that are sitting on the shelf right here at this end. We've got a hinge, and this hinge is set up with two pivot points. Each pivot point has two of what we call rafter arms on it that allow this awning to set up.

Setup

We have a strap on the back side here. What that strap allows us to do is to find something on the side of the vehicle to strap it off to. That creates tension on this rafter arm here and tension on each one of these panels. So you see the end of this panel is fairly taut, and that is the goal that holds the structure of this awning in place. Now notice we have a fully suspended awning that we can use here.

The trick of the matter is, yes, is it possible to use the awning free-standing? Yes, in no wind conditions. If there's any wind at all, it becomes problematic because this is one big umbrella. We don't want to make any damage to the awning, the rack, your vehicle, or otherwise. So what we suggest in every situation is that you put the legs down in position and stake the legs in place. It's wonderful; it looks awesome until it doesn't. When the wind comes around that you can't see, it can really make a mess of things. Even the awnings that are out there on the market that are free-standing, if you have those in wind, that wind is working against your vehicle. It can damage things like it or not; that's the condition of room.

Installation

Inside every one of the rafter arms that the awning is made out of, there is a leg. If you take the knob on that leg right here, turn it a little bit, slide it outwards, it drops off of a little clip up in that arm. You raise it into position and tighten that knob. It's very simple to do, and then the propane here holds that leg up and in place. It's simple to use. I'll show you how to do that in a second, but we have in each one of the arms the same leg that goes down to position. Our goal is to have these all set up horizontally from the hinge of the vehicle or the awning itself. That gives us a nice level plate.

On the bottom of each one of these legs, if you look down there, there are two holes in what we call the foot. What those holes are for is for putting stakes in place, and we stake the awning down. If you stake the awning down, a stake's going this way, they'll pull up the same way. So what we suggest is you take the stakes and put them at a 45-degree opposing angle. This is an anchor; this holds an awning in place. Now, if you put that in place, tie the legs down appropriately, this awning is very stable in winds up to 30-35 miles an hour without any concern whatsoever. It's a very sturdy awning in wind conditions.

If you feel you need to tie it down more, right up in the top of each of the rafter arms, just out from that leg, is a position for you to put a guy wire on to tie it out in place. But I've never needed one. If you think it's necessary, awesome, let's say it's there for you to use.

The other thing that we want to talk about here is that by staking that hand, you've now created an anchor for some force. What I'm talking about is if you decide that if it's raining, you want to drain or create a low point for the rain to run off, you can anchor that in there. Now that allows us to draw around the corners a little bit. You'll get some tension as you're flexing the hinge there. That's okay to occur to a point. Bring that down a little bit, tie it in place, and now you've created a low point for the water to run off of in the condition.

Store

Providing this setup, you utilize it as all you want. Now let's put it all back away.

Reverse Process

So reverse process, we take our stakes out, we take our leg up, you take that foot, we fold it to the bottom of the rafter arm, and right up inside the rafter arm is a little clip. In that clip, there is a wedge, and you'll feel that ledge. Once you hit that piece, get that leg in there. This leg is made out of square aluminum tubing, so that tubing has a hole in the end of it. That hole slides up and hooks onto the ledge there. You slide it towards that ledge, tighten the knob in place, and you're all good to go there. It's a lot easier once you've done it a few times.

Into that notch, and there we go. Okay, so let's fold up. Take the clip off of the other side here, that loosens the rafter arms. It's a simple process of returning all of the rafter arms to the air position in the cover. Now, remember those three straps that I was talking to you about that hold that in place? You want to make sure that those clear the rafter arms before you set them on the ledge. So notice here's one of those, you've got one here, two on top, two on bottom, and then they sit up on the bottom of that leg. So we just raise them up and find the ledge.

Now we've got our three straps over the top here. Now the cover on this awning is very tight, so there's a process of putting away the material. If we were to take this material and simply roll it up into a knot in the front, it creates too much mass on the front of the cover. So what we're going to show you is a trick that I've heard makes it a lot easier to do that.

Put that in there, fold it halfway up, take a handful from the notch of your thumb up to your fingers, take that, fold it once, fold it twice, and then roll that material nice and flat against the front of the arm. That goes into play. This clip holds the back, pulls some punch.

Okay, and we fold the cover back over the top of the awning here. Another nice thing about the Bat awnings is that we have two variations, one for the right-hand side and one for the left-hand side of your vehicle, and that makes it nice. So then if you choose to go from one side or the other, whatever is your preference, you can. But you'll notice that on each one of them, the zipper always ends up at the back of the vehicle, whether it's the right-hand side or the left-hand side. The zipper always ends up at the back, that way it doesn't open itself in the wind.

So now we put away the Bat awning, and it's already good to go off on your next adventure. The Bat 270 awning by Eezi-Awn is one of the best awnings on the market. The material is awesome. The material on the rain fly itself is a 260-gram ripstop material, impervious to water, full aluminum construction, there's no plastic in the design at all. It stows up nice and tight, it's very lightweight in relative terms, all in the 40-pound range. Fantastic, fantastic hobby.

If you have any questions at all, feel free to reach out to us at equipt.com. I'm Paul with Equipt, thanks for your time.