Missouri Outdoor

Getting Your Sleep is Very Important – Choose your bag-sleeping Carefully.

Getting a good sleep every night is crucial to having a good trip. It affects your judgement, personal safety, stamina and overall health and wellbeing. You need a good and restorative sleep to rebuild for the next day ahead.

How do you choose a sleeping bag?

And you though a bag-sleeping is a simple piece of camping-gear! Choose it well and consider all the factors, it really is well worth the effort.

You must match the sleeping bag comfort rating with the coldest temperature that you will expect on your trip. Don’t under-estimate as it will be one cold night exposing you to hypothermia if you get it wrong. Many folk move up to the next rating.

Things to consider when choosing a sleeping bag include the comfort rating, the type of insulation, the weight, the bag shape, and the net size when rolled up or compacted.

You should also look at your personal sleeping factors, one important one is whether you are a net hot or cold sleeper. Do you seem to generate a lot of heat or do you need a lot. I fall into the hot category myself.

The basic principle of a bag-sleeping is the use of a persons body heat, the insulated bag retaining of warmed air this layer close to the body. The layer of warm air then acts as a barrier between the body and the cold air outside the bag. The bag-sleeping acts as an insulator between the cold air and ground and as a heat retention bag.

What is the comfort rating?

The comfort rating is essentially the temperature rating of a bag-sleeping . This is the most extreme temperature that the both you and bag can withstand. What does for example a +20 bag comfort rating mean. This means that someone will remain comfortable warm with an outside air temperature down to 20 degrees Fahrenheit. The comfort rating is affected by a persons metabolic rate, that is the cold or warm sleeper, men tend to be warm sleepers and women cold ones, although this is very subjective and anecdotal.

The comfort rating of a bag-sleeping is also affected by the quality of the insulated sleeping pad. Cold and frosty grounds need a full length pad and when camping in snow or frozen ground then a warmer rated one or even two is required. It is surprizing how much heat that can be lost through the ground.

Another factor that you should consider is how much clothing you wear to bed. Some wear warm socks, long underwear, tee shirts and more. This all affects how warm you will be inside the sleeping bag. One last thing to consider is being hungry and dehydrated, a good warm meal and water intake will help produce body heat. If the bag gets too hot then you can always unzip and vent the bag-sleeping a little around your legs.

What about the insulation materials?

Like all camping-gear the factors are the weight and therefore the comfort factor, the degree of compressibility and the service life or durability.

Ducks and geese are always warm and their feather or down is an extremely efficient insulators with goose down being the lightest and best. Like the pillows and quilts at home the down filled bag-sleeping are very light and have a higher weight to warmth ratio than the synthetically filled bags. They do compress well into small rolls and tend to have a significantly increased service life over synthetic fills.

Down is graded in accordance with what is called the fill power, which is the number of cubic inches one ounce of down will displace, so the higher the rating number the better the insulation value. Down isn’t perfect however as if it gets wet it must be dried out. While more expensive this is more than made up by the longer life.

Synthetic fill materials are essentially plastic strands or polymers, which are commonly hollow to reduce weight and trap air. Unlike down they will give some insulation when wet and dry rapidly, which suits those camping out in rain a lot and they are also cheaper to buy. They are also non-allergenic for those that can’t take the goose down.

The shortcomings are that they are bulkier, have increased weight, have a shorter lifespan and does not hug the body shape as well as a down bag. As the weight of a body will compress insulation within the bag the importance of a good sleeping pad is essential as an accompanying piece of camping-gear. Get the right bag-sleeping and sleep well.
Go to Source

Email this post

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it, about it, and subscribe to the blog RSS feed.

Comments RSS