If someone is attempting to assess the general insulation of a panel of a down item, they would need to know two main things. On one hand there is measured loft, which is the physical space filled with insulation. The other is the quantity of fill in that space. Both Total fill weight and calculated […]
If you hold a measured loft constant, but you add more fill to it, density goes up and insulation goes up. That is misunderstood as higher density is warmer, which is not true. If we reverse it and hold the fill quantity constant but reduce loft, density goes up and insulation goes down. The correct […]
After the last round of testing down performance in wet conditions, the take-away was that the loft loss that happens when down gets wet, happens when wet down is compressed. If the trapped air in a lofted chamber is maintained, it’s rather difficult to get it wet. You can dunk a lofted chamber under water […]
The new pocket design is aimed at limiting some of the negative effects pockets can have on garments with loft. Therefore, there are some notes to be made on their use. The bag of the internal pocket is intentionally not connected to the garment. It is only connected at the entry point and at the […]
Small companies that make up the outdoor cottage industry are a likely source of innovation, due to the design freedom they have. However, these small companies typically don’t have the means, or it simply isn’t practical to spend $15k to protect their ideas for 9 years. Rather, for the most part, these businesses seem to […]
First, there were sleeping bags with as much insulation on the bottom as there is on the top. When the insulation in those bags became lighter and more delicate, we realized that the weight of a body would compress the insulation, rendering it useless. As a response, along came quilts, which did away with bottom […]
It’s always been very obvious to me, why using total fill weight, spread into an unknown area, can’t be an effective comparison metric. Over the years, there have been hundreds of examples of people being led astray by it, and this continually backs up my position on it. However, to anyone who isn’t constantly exposed […]
As we head towards autumn here in the NEUS, the first few cool nights are often a bit of a shock. After our bodies spent the hot summer adapting to staying cool in warm weather, they are ill equipped to conserve warmth in cool weather. It always highlights, to me, how much the perception of […]
Fill density in sewn through items is a balance between calculated loft and chamber width. As standard, our sweater fill density is optimized for static use, trying to maximize the warmth to weight ratio. There are cases where down garments get flexed into semi-active use where a higher density might be ideal. Examples might be […]
The short term exposure test is something I’ve done hundreds of times and the results were not surprising at all to me. It was more to provide a visual representation, instead of me just stating things. This long term test is something I haven’t specifically done, in this exact way, and the results were […]