In most cases, adding internal volume to a down sleep system will have detrimental effects on insulation efficiency. It’s usually an inefficiency feedback loop. Increased size promotes sprawl sleeping, which increases heat loss from the body. Then, that lost heat enters the system cavity, but the increased volume increases the lag time before that space […]
We’ve been building and selling our version(s) of false bottom sleeping bags for at least 8 years now (as of 2026). There are many hundreds of them out there by this point. The feedback we receive from people using them has been extremely positive. The original design has been so successful that I don’t recall […]
Part of the testing I do is keeping tabs on some of the long term usage pieces I have circulating around to see how different aspects are holding up. One area of interest is down loft durability. It is my opinion that in most cases, loft loss observed in down gear is due to oil […]
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. If we reverse it and hold the fill quantity constant but reduce loft, density goes up and insulation goes down. The correct conclusion would be that, […]
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 […]