Bundutec 8ft El Awning (270 Degree Awning Review)

Teegs · Apr 4, 2020

Bundutec El Awning Review

So I've owned this awning for a couple years now, and had planned on doing a thorough review as soon as I felt comfortable doing so. Then I dropped the ball and forgot to do one when I was halfway finished with this. Now that I've had a couple YEARS to break it in and really put it through the ringer, I am (more than) ready. Without further adue, I give you my in depth – written – review of the Bundutec El Awning.

TLDR: Great awning, and has stood up to ridiculous weather. That said, it DID require modification for this and takes TWO people to set it up and take it down in heavy winds. It's not perfect, but honestly, none of them are. Lots of coverage. Mounting it may take some creativity depending on your rig, and roof rack situation. Customer service in purchasing one was top notch. Expensive, but worth it for my purposes. Also, less expensive than some of the other similar options which would have required importing from Australia (at least during the time I was searching.).

Considerations:

When I started hunting the perfect 270 degree awning. I had a pretty strict set of design criteria that I was evaluating.

Covers from the front driver door, all the way around the rear hatch.

Integrated pole design.

Integrated guy line design.

Sloped, waterproof canopy.

Self supporting in zero-wind conditions.

Customer service.

Availability.

Durability.

Lots of coverage (sqft).

Budget of $1400-1600.

Comparison/Research:

Howling Moon

The awning that met most of these characteristics was honestly, Howling Moon's 6-Arm Swing Awn. From the first time I saw it, that awning was oozing with awesomeness.

https://www.howlingmoon.com.au/product/6-arm-270-degree-swing-awn

It has an integrated pole design, integrated guy lines, water proof, self supporting, and the most coverage out of any of the awnings I could find. This was due to two extra arms allowing the awning to be more rounded, rather that triangle shaped. Also importantly, it featured a canopy that seemed like it would shed water well. Finally, it also had zippers for adding walls (rather than Velcro), and fell into a the price point of $1400-1600. Or so I thought.

Sadly I ended up not getting this option because the customer service seemed stiff, and at the time, nobody imported the awning to the USA. I looked into it and from what I could tell it would cost an extra $400-600 just to get it here.

Alucab

https://www.alu-cab.com/product/270-shadow-awning/

Next I looked at the Alucab Shadow Awn. This thing looks just as quality as the Howling Moon, except that it lacks coverage over the front cab. They DID have a rain gutter attachment, though that is only compatible with their campers & camper shells. Being a USA company was enticing, and man it would be slick for the IG, but honestly the price point just wasn't doing it enough for me to pull the trigger. The material also looks like it wouldn't hold up as well to punctures and abuse as some of the other materials I looked at.

Darche

https://darche.com.au/touring/awnings-annexes/_item/eclipse-270-degree-awning

The Darche Eclipse was another awning that had front cab coverage. The main issue I had with this one were that it only extends 6.5ft from the mounting point. They do compensate by making it so the walls set up in an extended formation, giving you much more covered area should you decide to buy (re: expensive) and attach all the walls. Maybe if they made it so you could detach the awning and have it be free standing I would bite, but honestly I don't want to hook up 4-5 additional wall panels every time I have inclement weather. All three of the other awnings (Bundu, Howling, and Alucab) featured at least an 8ft range. Also the roof didn't seem as sloped as the others, and shedding water and snow is important to me. That said, the price point was the best out of all of them.

Decision

I looked deeply into at least one other option, but honestly I can't even remember who's it was. That said, the Bundutec El Awning passed the test based on a couple things.

First off, Jenn from their USA distributor worked to answer a lot of my questions. Her response time was great, and I am so glad she was able to answer things for me. She also reached out to me months after my first contact to see if I was still interested. I had contacted her asking a couple things, but then ran into some job security issues, and decided to put the awning on hold. I appreciated her reaching out, and truthfully, the responsiveness is huge part of why I pulled the trigger. It's an expensive purchase, and I knew if I imported anything from Australia, I'd get little/no support should something go wrong or be defective.

I also went with this awning because it met ALMOST all my original criteria, as well as some of the new criteria that I developed through my research.

The criteria it falls short on:

First off, this one comes with one integrated leg that is attached to the arm that folds out by the front door. I would prefer integrated legs on all arms (except the one that extends over the hood, for obvious reasons) but I'll get to that later.

Secondly, it doesn't have a six arm configuration, and thus you sacrifice some coverage. That said, you also probably save some weight.

However, the rest of the criteria was met in spades, AND to top it all off, I got free shipping through a promotion they were running. So I purchased the awning, and a couple extra poles, and while it shipped, I decided to figure out how to mount the damn thing.

Mounting:

*UPDATE: Well, I overloaded my roof rack and it's not safe to carry anything on anymore. I suspect it was one of the times the wind hit the awning really hard when we didn't have it staked down. Sold the hard shell, and acquired a rack with awning specific mounts from Dissent Offroad. (Also this bed rack is fricken sick.) This allowed me to ditch the aluminum angle (and a ton of weight) and mount the awning much more securely. I've left my original mounting setup below for reference, but note that it did fail after about 9 months of use. You will absolutely need to use something specific for mounting an awning. The amount of surface area for the wind to catch is huge, which can translate a giant load to your brackets and subsequently your roof rack, bed rack, or camper shell should your guy lines fail you.

Mounting any of these I suspect can be tricky. And I most DEFINITELY did not do it in the easiest or cheapest way. I have a Thule Cross Bar setup on my cap, and was feeling too impatient to get a different roof rack before I bought the awning. Honestly, I may have saved some serious cash if I had just gotten a different rack, or... maybe not.

That said, the awning itself consists of two extruded aluminum pieces that are around 8'-2” long. They are linked together, kind of like panel flooring, but seem very sturdy. I have not noticed ANY play between them yet. The arms are hinged and bolted on either end.

My plan was to buy an 8ft, 5”x5”x1/4” aluminum angle and just use factory bolting locations. Well, I'll admit it, I didn't measure (hey I was excited ok?) and ended up not realizing that the awning frame is over 8ft long. Dammit. So my $200 piece of 8ft aluminum isn't long enough, cannot be returned (had to order because nobody in town had it), and now I gotta drill holes through the awning itself (instead of just my aluminum angle).

But wait, there's more. In addition to drilling holes, I had to cut out part of the angle, because while it wasn't quite long enough to use the exsting bolts on both ends, it also wasn't short enough to clear the bolts on ONE end.

Finally, I had to make a pretty large cut out to make clearance for my pelican case on the Prinsu Cabrack. I made sure to give extra room to allow for flex between the bed and the cab. This part was planned, however.

Working with aluminum sucks. Thankfully I have a neighbor who lets me borrow his tools. Cutting and grinding sucked, and took forever. Drilling through the awning wasn't too terrible. I made sure to measure 5 times before drilling (I'm sure I'll still learn the lesson again someday.), and the trickiest part here was trying to get the correct hardware from the hardware store. (Because I want my bolts to match!) Also it was kind of tricky to get the nuts down in the extruded portion of the awning for the bolts towards the middle. What I mean is, I made 3 mounting points to connect the awning to the angle. One on each end, and one towards the middle. To keep the extruded aluminum from crushing, they used nuts as spacers, and fishing a couple of those down ~4ft was difficult because we were lacking proper tools.

Once we got that done, we adjusted our cross bars to be as far apart as possible. This was to maximize support for the awning, and keep the moment arms as small as possible at either end. Then we drilled holes in the angle, and attached the awning to the roof with some u-bolts. I'd LOVE to get a better system going, but honestly, this one has worked great. Even through some real shit.

First thoughts:

It can be stressful spending so much time getting this awning mounted only to HOPEFULLY have everything go alright during first deployment. And I will say, the awning was functional once I got it on the truck. But a few things needed to happen for it to be where I wanted it to be.

First off, it was stiffer than hell the first several times we deployed it. I tried to leave it deployed in the yard as much as I could during the first week in the sun, to hopefully stretch the material out a bit and eliminate some of the sag that was occurring in places.

It was also difficult to for the straps to reach my tie-down points on the roof racks because they weren't quite long enough. Finally, one leg just isn't enough to hold this behemoth up, even in good weather, and to add insult to injury, they didn't make any default ways to add poles to the rest of the arms. I mean, sure you could put a pole through the existing D-rings for the affixed guy lines, but the trouble with that is how they are attached to the canopy. The D-rings for the guy lines need to be pulled down, so if you don't stake the arm down, then the pole will hold the canopy up off the arm, putting wear and tear on places that shouldn't really experience it. Alternatively, you could drill a hole in the bottom of the arm and just slide the pin of an extra pole in there – and truthfully was the easiest option and what I ended up doing to a couple of the arms.

Modification:

But I wanted integrated poles dammit, so that's what I was going to do. After fabricating a bracket out of a piece of metal, and hacking apart one of the poles, I was able to add another fixed pole to the awning. I essentially copied the design of the existing pole, and it works fantastic. Once I got some Velcro riveted on to the arm to hold the pole when it's not deployed, I called it done. Now both “main” side poles have integrated legs. I also plan on adding a leg to the back pole, but for now this is doing the trick in most weather conditions (even pretty crappy ones). Despite all this, I do suspect that my roof rack flexing under the weight of the awning is the real reason the awning hangs low without more leg support.

I also extended my straps on either end of the awning. This was extremely easy to do. Just went out and bought 3/4” webbing that looked similar to what was already there. Then I tied them together with a water knot and re-threading. For the back strap, I added a loop with an alpine butterfly. The result was the front strap reached the part of my Prinsu rack that I wanted the hook to connect to, and the back now could be cinched even more because I was using a 2:1 advantage on it. Of course, I trimmed the ends, and plan on shrink-wrapping the remaining webbing for a super clean installation.

I also added a battery powered LED light strip to the awning. This was the best $7 proof of concept ever. We just bought a shitty stick-on one from Amazon to try it out and its worked fantastic, with one exception. Batteries don't do well in the cold. Otherwise, we have ample light when it gets dark out, and we can change the color of the light, have a dance party, put it in “red” mode to conserve our night vision, etc. We actually developed the idea during a hot sunny day of all things. The contrast between the being under the awning, and the brightness around you can make it difficult for the eyes to adjust and see anything – so we thought we'd add some LED lights to help with that. With a little sticky-backed Velcro, we made mounting points for the remote control and the battery pack. Though these two items are relocated somewhere safer when we pack it up. Eventually, a hard wired route will be taken, but that's for when I decide to teach myself to be an electrician.

I plan on redoing the guy lines at some point. The existing ones are awkward, and not a bright enough color for me at night after a few beers. They will be neon green, and have a tensioning device when I am done with them.

The only other real change I want to make is to add some sort of rain gutter between the awning and the back of the truck. I hung the awning so far back because I didn't want more than 20” of unsupported length from the cross bars up front, and I also wanted my pelican to be at least a little accessible. Finally, the further back I made it, the more coverage we would have in general. The trouble is, we have a pretty good sized gap, and in rain we have to leave the hatch closed. I do have some ideas on how to accomplish this, and will update when I get it done.

Performance:

Ok, down to the reason you might have stuck with me this far. Does the damn thing do its job or not? The answer is definitely yes. Though my modifications with the poles and straps were absolutely necessary.

Setup is very simple (especially when the straps are long enough), requiring only one person to do it. During especially windy weather, I will have someone hold the arms of one end of the awning while I deploy the other. Once one side is attached, and tensioned properly, its a snap to get the other one up, unless the direction of heavy winds is blowing exactly the wrong way. In low winds, a single person can set the awning up, and get it staked down without much trouble. But if the winds get to more than 30mph, you might need help, and could run into trouble/damage trying to do it yourself. Though, this is also true with all the other awnings on the market. You will need to flip a portion of the awning over itself to bring the arms out for deployment. Not a huge deal, but it means you can't just grab both sets of arms and deploy at the same time. Bundutec does cover this in the instruction manual.

Tear-down is also fairly easy, though not as easy as setup. One person can do tear-down in good weather, though depending on your height, and your vehicle's height, you may have trouble folding the awning up into its bag, reaching the cinch straps, and zipping it up. I'm 5'8”, and I suspect when I lift the truck, I will need a step stool, and if not, then my wife certainly will. Generally speaking I undo the front of the truck, bring the arms around, and then undo the back of the truck. Here I will fold the legs up, and fold the back arms under, and then finish with the front arms. Again you will need to move a flap of the awning over the arms for it to pack correctly. Learning where the fold the awning to get it to fit in the bag easily takes a couple tries, but isn't too bad once you get the hang of it. Even with another leg permanently attached, I can get it to fit just fine. Again, in really windy weather you will need another person to help you.

Sun performance: Great. The awning really is several degrees cooler than standing in the sun (duh).

Rain performance: Also great, especially once the awning get stretched out so that you can pull it tight enough for it not to pool water. That said, it did take a snow storm to stretch out enough for this to happen. We're talking about adding some walls to the two portions at the rear to block wind and create more usable space. There is Velcro on the awning for walls you can buy, but honestly, those walls are going to be expensive, heavy, and dark. I think I might try and make some out of cuben fiber because they'll still let light in, and will be light weight to boot. Though, they will be expensive.

Update: Even after the awning is broken in, it does have a tendency to pool water a bit. Not a deal breaker, and still probably better than the competition, but I figured I'd mention it anyway. I have some ideas on how to mitigate this using tent poles, but its a pretty low priority for me so will likely be some time before I do it. Also, I still want to do walls for the back two panels of the awning. I've moved away from cuben fiber because its just too expensive. That said, sil-nylon is a fraction of the cost and will probably do just as good a job. Haven't gotten around to doing it yet though because frankly, I don't own a sewing machine.

Snow performance: Yup, I took the thing in snow. We got 1.5 inches of the wettest snow on earth, and the awning held up with only two poles attached. That said, this is what made me want to attach more poles. The sag was real, and I did fear for my roof rack a bit. That said, it worked, and stretched out a bunch. Now the awning is nice and taught when deployed.

Wind performance: This will depend on a lot. I've spent years camping and backpacking with a tarp (not a tent) in extreme weather, and thus have a very good understanding on how to set things up in the wind. Learning ways to stake your tarp down in too soft, or too rocky (i.e. solid) ground is paramount. Also, you may need to get creative in how you set up poles if you're an idiot (like me) and forget to bring them. That said, I did find a nifty way to secure the back guy line to my rock slider.

Generally speaking this arm doesn't need a pole, but we were experiencing 40-50mph winds from exactly that direction, and it was pushing the arm down, rather than lifting it up. Once I got the awning locked down, the thing didn't budge. Still took some serious effort to get anchors strong enough to hold the the surface area collecting wind.

Honestly, after about two years of use and abuse the awning is still going strong. Packing it up takes some effort, especially for short people like me, but it's still pretty easy. A step stool goes a long way. Wouldn't trade it for the world!