What to buy first for a first night out

Settle the shape of the night before you buy anything

One question comes before every purchase: does the kit get carried on your back, or does it come out of a car boot at the pitch? Nothing else about the list changes as much. Carried kit is bought on weight and packed size and pays for both. Kit that travels in a boot is bought on comfort and on packed length, which is what rules out most camp tables and chairs long before their weight does.

Answer that question honestly, for the trips you will actually make this year rather than the ones you intend to make eventually. Then work down the list below in order.

First: the shelter, and which weight it is sold on

Whatever form it takes — a trekking tent, a tarp, a bivy bag or a hammock — the shelter is the first purchase, because everything else fits around it.

Read the weight twice. Packed weight counts everything in the bag: pegs, guylines, repair sleeve, stuff sack. Trail weight counts only the parts needed to stand it up. Comparing one maker’s trail weight against another’s packed weight is the commonest error in the category, and the difference runs to several hundred grams. Where only one figure is published and it is not labelled, treat it as the trail weight and add the pegs yourself.

Then read the waterproofing as two numbers, not one. Hydrostatic head is quoted in millimetres of water column and is quoted separately for the flysheet and for the groundsheet. The floor figure is normally the higher of the two, because a knee on a wet pitch presses harder than rain falls, and a page that gives you only the fly figure has told you half the story.

Last, the pitch type. Freestanding, semi-freestanding, or pitched on trekking poles — this is what decides whether the shelter will stand on a wooden platform or needs ground soft enough to take a peg. If you have not read the pitching pages yet, read that one before you order, because it is the constraint people discover on site.

Second: the mat, because the cold comes from underneath

People buy a warmer bag when the problem is the ground. The mat is the layer between you and it, and its decisive figure is R-value, a measure of resistance to heat flow. Since ASTM F3340 gave the industry a common test, R-values from different makers can be compared directly — check the figure is quoted against that standard rather than invented in-house.

R-values add up, which is why the thin closed-cell foam mat still exists: put one under an inflatable mat and you get the sum. Thickness answers a different question — whether a side sleeper’s hip reaches the ground through a compressed mat — and width decides whether your shoulders and elbows spend the night off the edge, which undoes the rating you paid for.

Third: the bag, and the number under the season name

Two bags described as three-season can be a long way apart. Bags tested to EN 13537 or its successor ISO 23537 carry a comfort figure and a limit figure. These are laboratory values, measured on a heated mannequin rather than on people: they are an indication for comparing bags, not a promise about a night, and the maker’s own guidance governs use. Compare the comfort figure, and only between bags that name the standard — a bare number with no standard beside it cannot be lined up against one that has been tested.

Then the insulation. Down is rated by fill power, the volume a fixed mass lofts to, and that figure means nothing until you also read the fill weight, which is the grams actually in the bag. Synthetic is heavier and bulkier for the same stated rating and costs less. Fit matters as much as either: length, shoulder girth and foot box shape decide the dead air the rating assumes.

Fourth: something that boils water

Choose the fuel before the stove. Screw-on gas canisters to the EN 417 thread, with their 7/16 inch UNEF valve, are the lightest and simplest, and their pressure falls as the canister empties and as the air cools. Bayonet and pierceable canisters are entirely different fittings — read the wording in the stove manual and match it exactly, because the wrong valve simply will not go on.

Compare stoves on stated output in watts alongside the boil time the maker publishes with its water volume. A boil time with no volume beside it is not a number. For the pot, a solo pan in the region of 800 ml to 1 litre boils enough for one dehydrated meal and a drink; check its internal diameter swallows your burner and canister, because that is what decides the volume it takes up.

Fifth: light, read on the setting you will use

The number on the box is peak lumens and it is the least useful figure in the category. Makers publishing to the ANSI/PLATO FL1 convention give three figures together — lumens, beam distance in metres and runtime — and runtime is defined as the point at which output has fallen to a tenth of its initial value. That definition is the whole subject: an unregulated lamp reaches its stated hours by dimming from the first minute, while a regulated lamp holds a level and then drops. Compare the runtime published for the middle setting, and look for a lock mode so the lamp does not switch itself on in the bag.

Sixth: water, and the part this site does not decide

Buy the container on its mouth diameter rather than its capacity. The 63 mm wide mouth is the fitting that filters, gravity bags and insulated sleeves are built around; a 42 mm narrow mouth drinks more cleanly and accepts far less. If a filter is on your list, read the water page first: what a filter is stated to do, and whether any given source is safe to drink, are two different questions, and the second one belongs to the maker’s instructions and the local authorities.

What can wait until you know how often you go

Chairs, tables, lanterns, cool boxes, camp showers and storage boxes are all bought better once you know whether you are out three times a year or thirty. Two cheap exceptions are worth buying immediately: a decent set of tent pegs, because tents ship with the cheapest the maker can supply, and a long-handled spoon of roughly 20 cm if you eat from foil pouches, since a standard 16 cm one puts your knuckles in the food.

Two checks before you press order

Check the canister valve wording against the stove manual, and check the shelter’s pitch type against the ground you expect. Both are free to check now and expensive to discover at the pitch.