This is the most common gap between what is supplied with a canopy and what the canopy is actually standing on.

Where canopies really go

Market squares, car parks, exhibition halls, school playgrounds, retail forecourts, paved courtyards.

Every one of those is a surface a stake will not enter, and most canopies still ship with a stake kit as the only anchoring supplied.

What ballast actually needs to be

A stated weight per leg, not a recommendation to “use some weights”.

Stacking plates around the leg are tidy and permanent; fillable sand or water bags weigh nothing in the van and are filled on site. Which one is right depends entirely on whether the canopy travels.

Sidewalls change the number

An open canopy lets air pass through it. A walled one does not, so the same conditions now push on a solid surface.

If you add walls, add ballast. Any supplier quoting walls without mentioning it has not thought about your pitch.

The habit that matters

Ballast goes on before the roof goes up, not after the canopy is standing.

It takes the same two minutes either way and it removes the window in which an unweighted frame is standing on a hard surface.