Synth Skirt Quilt

This is a loose fill synthetic version of our Basic Skirt Quilt. See that page for build details.

Synthetic insulation provides options for those who want to avoid animal products and for those who want something that won’t lose loft when wet. These choices come with major drawbacks in that synthetic options are heavier and bulkier. In the context of sleep systems, the latter often ends up being the bigger issue. Many synthetic batting options end up being absolutely massive in a backpack. This loose fill synthetic option ends up being about the same weight as those batting options, but compresses much, much smaller.

Why would someone choose synthetic insulation? There are considerable moral and ethical reasons to avoid animal products. This is usually an endless “chicken or the egg” debate, with no clear right answer. Whichever route we take, I think it is important to recognize the impact that route has and do our best to limit it. I think this product can improve the ethics, impact, and performance drawbacks of choosing the synthetic route. No synthetics come anywhere near the warmth to weight performance of down, and this is no exception. However, it does improve some aspects.

Moisture performance is another reason people choose synthetics, but it’s a complicated topic. People often just assume that if you hike in humid and wet places, you need a synthetic quilt. Often, that really isn’t the case. With a little education and skill, it’s usually pretty easy to keep your down sleep system dry, even in very wet weather, and carrying a down system will be much lighter and smaller, so it makes that education worth it. Then, you get into the shoulder season and winter use, where internal condensation becomes the primary cause of moisture accumulation. This is when it become more difficult to keep your down system dry, but over-system use can completely solve the issue, by moving dewpoint and cold surfaces out of the down. So then it becomes a comparison of weight and bulk between a dual layer with a down inner and synthetic outer and a full synthetic. There are cases where the dual layer ends up being heavier and bigger than just having a full synthetic. Once you get down into low temps, the dual layer starts to be the clear winner. Having the bulk of high loft in down and just a thin layer as an oversystem wins clearly, over having high loft in all synthetic. It’s a moving target, but the range where full synthetic can potentially win on weight, over a dual layer, is typically above 10f. This is heavily dependent on many factors though.

Looking at the moisture performance aspect can present some ways to offset the weight penalty. For instance, it’s reasonable to assume you could get away with a lighter shelter if you didn’t need to worry about rain getting in as much. It could allow more cowboy camping without risk of catastrophic loft collapse if you get caught out. There is potential for using a sleep system for other static active uses if there is less risk of loft collapse.

The loose fill works great for these quilts at the 20f level and below. 30f can work, but the narrow chambers make production long and expensive. At 40f and above, it makes much more sense to use a batting product. The plan is to offer this quilt with batting at a 50f level and loose fill at a 20f level.

Climashield APEX has filled this roll, as one of the choices we would use for someone wanting a synthetic quilt. However, there are a few issues with APEX, and other batting style insulations.

• Climashield APEX, specifically, does not contain any recycled content. 100% virgin polyester. I’m sure there are reasons, but in this day in age, recycling some of the mountains of plastic we produce, just seems like a very basic, responsible thing to do.
• Any batting style insulation inherently will have a lot of pattern cut off waste since you’re cutting shapes out of a sheet
• Climashield APEX (and many other synthetic insulations) do not compress well. This isn’t a big deal for small items, but when you get into garments, and especially into sleep systems, APEX can be downright huge.
• Due to the bulk issue above, the total amount of insulation you can build in is often limited. Partially because of the finished bulk, but also because that bulk makes production really difficult as you try to wrestle sewing through multiple layers.

It has taken me a long time to crack the code on the best fill specifications for this loose fill, but once I did, it made all of those aspects look a lot better.

• It is 100% recycled.
• There is zero production waste from production. We only use what we need.
• It compresses significantly smaller than APEX. It’s probably closer to down, in compressed size, than to APEX, but still larger than down.
• Since we aren’t sewing through bulky layers, we can scale it up to whatever insulation level we need. There is a limit to how low it can go, due to control and coverage, but it allows us to make warmer synthetic items than we previously could with APEX.

Test samples have faired very well under long term compression, with some loft loss that is typical of synthetic insulation. The pro for loose fill, in this regard, is that you can anticipate this loss and compensate for it so that it doesn’t effect the eventual outcome. It isn’t just a sheet that will lose loft. It’s loose, so we can build in a extra density that will fill in when some loft loss occurs. Like most synthetic insulations, the “settling” tends to occur early in its life, and then it tends to stay steady from there.