Hey There

We love the outdoors. We especially love getting outside in the wilds of Scotland. But we don't always like having to use a traditional tent. We also realised that buying a roof tent was expensive (like, really expensive), and that for a lot of the time it would either sit unused on the roof of the car sapping fuel consumption or would have to be taken off the car and stored somewhere when not in use. That seemed like a faff, so the idea of Tents Up Top was born...

Camping is great....tents sometimes not so much

We're a small engineering, R&D and manufacturing team based in the North-East of Scotland nr. Banchory (about 25 minutes inland from Aberdeen). We own and operate a company called Juice Engineering Ltd. All of us love the outdoors and what is on offer on our doorstep. But we realised that sometimes tents and camping can be a bit of a faff. Especially if the unpredictably Scottish weather comes into play. We've tried everything over the years, campervans, motorhomes, small backpacking tents & humungous palatial family tents. But none of them has ever been quite right for one reason or another. We noticed there was a growing trend towards people buying roof tents and they can regularly be seen attached the tops of all kinds of vehicles, which got us wondering what all the fuss was about. We decided to give one a go - which unfortunately meant shelling out to buy one, as there seemed no other way to try before you buy. Thankfully when our first roof tent arrived it was exactly what we had been looking for.

But......

Then we realised that there were now two options.

We could leave the tent permanently attached to the roof of our car. This is what the majority of roof tent owners appear to do (read on to find out why). This would result in extra wind noise when driving, poor fuel consumption, greater wear & tear on both the tent and the vehicle & roof bars and also take up the entirety of the roof meaning that it couldn't be used for carrying anything else (like the bike racks we used all the time). The whole concept seemed kind of daft for something that would maybe get used for 1 or 2 nights in every 30.
We could put the roof tent on and off our car as and when we needed it. This solves a lot of the previous problems but present new issues of its own. Such as, where would we safely store the roof tent between use and how easy are they to lift on and off the roof of a tall vehicle anyway? We struck gold on this one because although the roof tents are big and heavy (65kg!) we already owned an engineering company with a warehouse / workshop and a forklift. Without these option 2 just seemed totally impractical.

With a certain sense of smugness we continued to enjoy the roof tent lifestyle - frequently getting out into the wilds with small kids in tow. One day we realised, although we're lucky, loads of other people never get to experience the thrill of being able to make and break camp in a matter of mere minutes (especially useful in the rain or while being plagued by midges on the West Coast of Scotland!) unless they are prepared to purchase one of these tents AND live with the compromises. That's how the idea to rent our roof tent and Tents Up Top came about...