Since we tent camp regularly, whether during a road trip or just on a free weekend, we end up needing to charge some items overnight in the tent.
To make this process a bit easier, last year we put together a dedicated tent charging kit. While it might feel a bit redundant—I have copies of these same items in the car—having a separate kit makes it much easier to manage.
We just grab the whole kit and leave it in the tent all weekend, so we never have to worry about what charging cords or battery packs we need, and where they exactly are at the moment.
I figured it might be useful to review what’s in it, in case you’d like to make your own.
Our charging needs:
Items to charge every single night:
- iPhones (2)
- Apple Watches (2)
- Headlamps (2)
Items that don’t need to be charged every night:
- Tent lantern
- Desk fan
- Kindle Paperwhite (2)
- AirPods
Kit contents:
- TomToc storage pouch
- Battery pack1 (2)
- Apple Watch chargers (2)
- USB-C to Lightning cables (2 of the standard 3ft cables)
- USB-A to micro USB (4 short cables)
How we operate
We each get our own charger, which lives on “our side” of the tent.
I wear my Apple Watch at night, but Jen doesn’t. So she uses a small usb-c-to-a adaptor and keeps it plugged in all night. I wear mine at night, so I quickly charge mine using the fast usb-c charger for 15-20 mins before going to bed, before swapping mine phone cable into that sub-c charger slot. We each use a usb-a to fully recharge our respective headlamps, and that leaves 1-2 usb-a slots open for charging the occasional items. We don’t really use the wireless charger (since it’s easy to bump the phone off at night), but certainly could if we need the extra charging ports.
If we’re on a longer road trip, then we’ll bring the kit into a hotel room when we have one to recharge the battery packs.
It’s nothing fancy, but as always, it’s useful to have a ready-to-go kit and a system for how you do common things.
- It’s a knock-off battery pack from Amazon that’s 30800mAh with one PD usb-c port, 2 usb-a ports, and a 15W MagSafe wireless charger. It comfortably lasts a three-day weekend. ↩︎