Equipt 101: Awnings & Wind
An unpredicted strong gust of wind can get under your awning fabric, causing it to lift beyond its endurance. Eezi-Awn's selection of awnings are constructed with the highest quality hardware and fabrics available in the industry are built to withstand wind and rain, but it's our job as the user to be mindful of Mother Nature's power and take a few precautions.
Video Transcript
So one of the big questions we get about awnings is how good are they in wind. Well, that really is a 'depends' kind of question. You want to always be careful with awnings in wind. First of all, what you should do is always face the awning downwind from the vehicle. If you face the awning into the wind, the wind comes into the vehicle and has to go somewhere. It either has to go left, right, or up, and typically it goes up. What happens then is your awning lifts up into the air, flips over your vehicle, and damages both the awning rack, car, and everything in between.
The Eezi-Awn awnings are really good in wind if you stake them down correctly. Let's take a look at the foot, where the business end of this whole deal goes on. One thing that I really like about the Eezi-Awn awnings is that at the bottom of the leg, they have a foot that has a hole on each side of it. We've got a hole on this side and a hole on this side. What that allows us to do is to anchor the leg very well. If you put a stake into the ground vertically, it's going to come up vertically. So what we do is we take two stakes in here and we take a stake in each direction. This direction creates an anchor.
We put this in very easily. So this is going to go in pretty easy. We put an anchor in this direction here and we cross it on this side with an anchor in this direction. Now that's an anchor. If you have that in something more than sand, even in sand that's pretty good, but if you put that into dirt or something else, what that's going to do is allow this leg to hold the whole awning down without any guy wires whatsoever in up to 30-40 mile an hour winds. It's not going to have a problem.
The big thing that people like to do with the hinged awnings like we have here with the Swift, the Bat, the Manta awning is to open it up freestyle and let it freestand. It's terrible to do that. You need to tie those awnings down. Each one of them has legs that drop down out of the raft or arms here. Put the legs down, even it out, and stake it into the ground. You can't see a wind coming, and you can mess up a very big investment very fast that way. So by putting them in the ground in the next, you're good to go.
This is Paul with Equipt. Thanks for watching.
