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Pop up canopy question


AustinBike
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My wife and I went to pace bend this morning and just sat out by the water, nice thing to get out of the house. We needed shade and saw people with pop up canopies and thought we need one of those.

But none of the canopies have the tie-downs and stakes. Any idea on the best solution? It was pretty windy today and it looks like you really need something to hold the canopy down or it will be in the lake before too long.

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My in-laws live on the beach in Galveston and we go through a pop-up canopy per season.  Since it's exposed to the salt air, it doesn't last that long so we rarely buy anything fancy.  There are a few techniques to keep it from blowing away but the best approach I've seen is to use those twist-in anchors on the two windward corners.  We also extend the legs such that the side facing the wind (windward) is lower.  We have a prevailing wind at the beach so that's easy to guess.  If there is a chance that the wind might switch around on you, anchor opposite corners.  As long as you can keep the air from getting up under it, you're generally fine in everything but a big gust (think front rolling in).

Some people just put weights on the legs and that can work but I don't like carrying extra weights down to the beach.  The beer in the cooler is heavy enough.

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Get 4 Home Depot buckets. Place the legs inside the buckets. Fill buckets with whatever you find onsite (sand, rocks, water will work if not too windy). If it's really windy or just want to use water for ease, you can tie the legs directly to the buckets. These work great and also available at HD:

4877.jpg

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I've got one of those pop up deals. It has tried to run away at least half the times I have used it. What I end up doing is tying a cooler to one of the legs. It's not going anywhere without taking all the beer with it. I swear one time it got close though. Could have been Christmas for someone wherever the wind gave out.

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We used to go through 2-3 of those a year at work. I've anchored them to the ground with masonry screws right through the feet into a slab, only to watch it tumbleweed down a car lot😆

 

The best ones have the blow off panels up top. Also, smaller is better.

Edited by ATXZJ
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The cheap ones ($100 9X9 or 10X10) don't last long.  They don't sell spare parts even though they are easily repairable.  I've repaired my own with brackets and screws from home depot.  I've gotten extra years out of it with a couple of repairs (pro tip:  don't lend it out to kids' elementary teacher to deploy indoors on jungle theme day unless you want it back broken).  

BSS has a really nice one with much sturdier and bigger legs.  It gets used a lot.  I wouldn't mind spending the money for something that's not disposable.

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The $39 Wal-mart option went to Pace Bend with us today. Need to get some better stakes, the shitty bent metal ones barely held in the wind, but Amazon will have some deluxe $4 stakes here by Saturday. Big success, but most importantly a few hours outside of the house.

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Just remembered: A few years ago some friends had a canopy that kept blowing over. After repairing it a few times, someone discovered you could buy mesh "walls" that attached to the frame under the canopy. The high winds still provided a breeze, but, it never blew over again.

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