One of the biggest benefits of owning a roof top tent is the comfort it adds over a ground tent. Sleeping on the built-in mattress and a flat surface makes for a great night of sleep!
However, failing to properly level your vehicle can throw all of these benefits out of whack. Odds are, where ever you park your vehicle it will be a slightly uneven surface. This will make sleeping in your roof top tent extremely uncomfortable since you will feel like you are about to roll out of it at any moment.
The best practices for leveling your vehicle when using a roof top tent are to park on the flattest surface you can find and then use leveling blocks, recovery boards, or wood planks to further level your vehicle.
Now let’s talk more about these specific items you can use and why I recommend them for all camping trips!
Best practices for leveling your vehicle
When leveling your roof top tent (RTT) you can eyeball it or use a leveling tool for a more precise baseline.
One of the essential items for RTTs that I recommend are recovery boards. They are typically used when your vehicle gets stuck in mud or sand by sticking them under the tires for added traction.
They are also great for leveling your vehicle too! Since you should have these on every off-roading and camping adventure it makes it very easy to bring these along.
Another great option is the Tri-Lynx Leveling blocks! These are more robust than recovery boards because you can attach link them together, kind of like legos! So if you need more height under on tire you can easily stack a couple of blocks on top of each other.
Now that you have the right tools for the job, I’ll talk more about my exact process for leveling my vehicle.
How I level my vehicle (step-by-step)
Full disclosure, my process is not an exact science! I don’t use a leveling tool since we actually have a built-in leveling tool in the dashboard of our vehicle.
To start I will park exactly where I want the vehicle to be for the night and see what the leveling tool says as well as step outside the vehicle and give it an eye test.
Once I have a pretty good idea of which wheels on the vehicle need to be lifted, I will back the car up to about a foot away and place the leveling blocks in front of the tires.
After that, I drive a foot forward on top of the blocks and repeat my process of checking the leveling gauge and giving it the eyeball test. I will do this until I feel it is close to perfect.
Last but not least I open the tent and climb inside to see if I feel I am being “pulled” in any direction. If it feels completely level then you are all done, if not, back to the drawing board!
It is a fairly simple process but it can be tedious getting it just right. However, taking the extra five minutes to do this before setting up camp is well worth it!
Why should you level your vehicle and roof top tent?
To clarify, you are trying your best to level your vehicle and not the roof top tent itself. The tent should be fairly level already when you installed it to your car.
Now, why is it important to level your vehicle when using a RTT? Besides the obvious reason of safety, the glaringly noticeable thing to me was purely for comfort.
Our first time taking the RTT out for an overnight camping trip was full of learning experiences. I would say none more than how tedious it was to level the vehicle.
Once I got the vehicle as level as I could, when we climbed into the tent to go to bed I realized it wasn’t level at all! We could both feel gravity slowly pulling our feet towards the entrance of the tent.
I did the best I could leveling the tent with what I could find like a rock in the woods. Having leveling blocks or recovery boards would’ve made it so much easier and also would have allowed for a more comfortable night of sleep too.
So take it from me who has learned the hard way, it is far easier to spend the $20 on these items to ensure your vehicle and RTT are perfectly level on every camping trip!
Wrapping up and other helpful content
The mattress in RTTs is one of its most redeeming qualities. Failing to properly level your vehicle is not only unsafe but downright makes it hard to sleep in as well.
The process is straight forward and the tools to do it are reasonably cheap too! Take it from me, this was one of my biggest takeaways after our first night testing out our RTT!
If you found this helpful I think you will find this article, Essentials For Roof Top Tent Camping, and also my Youtube channel to be just as informative so be sure to check those out!