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Is 2000mm Hydrostatic Head enough, I thought the minimum rating was 3000mm to be considered "Waterproof" looks lovely, but that's a real worry

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Most tents provide the HH spec for the new fabric, but that's a nearly useless spec because waterproof coatings can wear dramatically such that the new spec tells you almost nothing about how the coating really holds up. Lots of coatings can test at 5,000 or even 10,000mm but they can also be very thin and easily abraded or cracked so they might only test at 500mm after a few weeks of use (imagine a super thin layer of plastic where it is very waterproof but also easily damaged vs something thicker). Consider why so many rain jackets leak even with impressive 20,000mm specs. It's because the coatings/membranes are so thin or poorly impregnated that the coating degrades rapidly even though it was great when new. It's the same thing with tents, but instead of recognizing the problem (degrading coatings) people look for ever higher new specs .What you really want are coatings that last. Because of this, with the X-Mid we provide the spec for heavily worn fabric. The new fabric actually tests much higher than 2000mm. I'm not sure how high because our testing maxes out at 3500mm, but it's higher than that. We wear test it to simulate years of use, and then unlike anyone else, provide the spec for that worn fabric since that more accurately represents how it will perform years down the road. To illustrate that, here is a graph showing the HH of the X-Mid fabric (green) over time (machine generated wear cycles) against some popular competitors fabrics. Note that 3500mm is the max of the testing equipment, so results there are actually higher. A key point here is that several of these fabrics are higher than the X-Mid at the beginning (0 wear cycles) and would test at >5000mm, but all of them are lower than the X-Mid by the end because the X-Mid coatings are heavily impregnated.
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So you don't really need 3000 mm - you need about 600 mm to be higher pressure than rain can ever exert or 1000mm to be safe. If someone says 3000mm is the minimum, it's because they're trying to get a fabric that will still test about 1000mm when used. So at >3500mm new and about 2000mm heavily used, the X-Mid fabric is reliably waterproof.
(Edited)
Darraghkilroy
1
Jun 19, 2020
dandurstonThanks for clarifying.
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