Looking after your kit

Twenty minutes on the evening you get home, and the highest-value habit in the whole subject. Everything later in this guide is a consequence of skipping it.

1. 1

   Empty the pack completely, the same day

   Every pocket, including the lid you forget about. Wet kit in a closed pack is mould in three days, and food left in a lid pocket is why the shed has mice.

2. 2

   Dry the tent, inner and fly separately

   Pitch it in the garden if you can, or hang the fly over a bannister. It is dry when the seams and corners are dry, not when a panel feels dry.

3. 3

   Take the sleeping bag out of its stuff sack

   Hang it somewhere airy for a day to lose the moisture it took from you overnight, then store it uncompressed. Never leave it in a compression sack between trips.

4. 4

   Open the pad and leave it flat

   Valve open, unrolled, somewhere it can dry inside. Moisture from your breath goes into an inflatable pad every time you blow it up, and it stays there until you let it out.

5. 5

   Rinse grit off zips, poles and pegs

   Fresh water, a soft brush, dry before they go away. Grit destroys zips; salt and damp corrode aluminium pole sections.

6. 6

   Note what broke or nearly broke

   The bent peg, the sticky zip, the pad you topped up at 3am. The repair you do in October is cheap; the failure you find on a Friday night in April is not.

7. 7

   Store it dry, loose and out of the sun

   Ultraviolet light is the fastest way to destroy nylon, and lofted insulation hates being squashed. Packing a backpack covers how it all goes back in.

A sleeping bag does not insulate with its fill. It insulates with the still air the fill holds, and the volume of that air is what loft means. Anything that permanently reduces loft has permanently reduced the warmth of the bag, and there is no putting it back.

Two things destroy it. The first is long-term compression: held crushed for months, the fill does not fully recover. The second is dirt, because body oils work into down clusters, weigh them down and stop them opening. Both are avoidable, and both are why a well-kept fifteen-year-old bag can outperform a neglected five-year-old one.

• Store it uncompressed, in the large cotton or mesh sack it came with, or hung in a wardrobe. The compression sack is for walking, not for the other fifty weeks.
• Use a liner. Silk or synthetic, it takes the sweat and the oils instead of the bag, and it washes in a normal load.
• Air the bag after every trip before it goes away, and never vacuum-pack it for space.

Most people wash a sleeping bag far too rarely. A bag that has lost loft is often not worn out, just dirty. Wash a well-used one roughly once a season.

Down

Use a down-specific wash, never ordinary detergent: detergent strips the natural oils from the plumes and leaves residue that holds water. Gentle, cool cycle, front loader with no central agitator, and at least one extra rinse — leftover soap is the main reason a bag will not loft afterwards. Support the whole bag as you lift it out: sodden down is heavy, and the internal baffles are light fabric.

Drying is the long part, and where people give up. Tumble dry on the lowest heat with a few clean dryer balls, expect hours rather than a cycle, and pull the clumps open by hand as you go. It is dry when there are no dense lumps anywhere, not when the outside feels dry.

Synthetic

Simpler and more tolerant: a mild non-biological liquid, a gentle cool cycle, an extra rinse, then a very low tumble dry or a flat line dry out of direct sun. The risk here is heat rather than soap, because high temperatures deform the fibres and deformed fibres do not loft. Either way, read the label first — the 87 bags in this pool come from 25 brands with genuinely different instructions.

A tent packed away damp is the most common way people destroy an expensive piece of kit. Mould grows within days in a warm bag, stains the fabric permanently, and speeds up the breakdown of the waterproof coating. Polyurethane coatings degrade by hydrolysis — they react with water over time, faster when warm — and the result is the sticky, peeling, faintly vinegary flysheet that everyone recognises and nobody can repair. Packing a wet tent to get home is fine; leaving it packed is not.

• Store it loosely, stuffed rather than rolled to the same creases. Repeated folding along identical lines wears the coating, and that is where a fly eventually leaks.
• Assemble poles from the middle outwards rather than letting the shock cord snap them together. Snapping chips the ferrules and stretches the cord, which is why an old tent will not stand up straight.
• Keep grit out of zips and never force one. Back a snag off rather than pulling harder. A worn slider that no longer closes the teeth behind it can usually be replaced on its own.
• Peg the guys out properly, and do not leave a tent pitched in full sun for weeks. Most tent damage is wind damage to a bad pitch, and ultraviolet light is what eventually makes a fly tear like paper. Choosing a tent covers which shapes forgive a poor pitch.

Seams are the other job. Most tents ship taped; some, silicone-coated ultralight shelters in particular, ship unsealed and expect the owner to seal them. Find that out before the first wet night rather than during it, and match the sealant to the fabric — silicone-based for silicone-coated nylon, urethane for polyurethane-coated. The wrong one will not bond and peels off in sheets.

Of the 63 pads here, 46 are air and 9 self-inflating: 55 things that can go down in the night. The 8 foam mats cannot, and that reliability is a real part of their case. Carry the patch kit that came with the pad.

1. Check the valve. A pad that softens slowly is more often a valve seated on a grain of grit, or a loose cap, than a hole.
2. Inflate it hard and listen section by section, close to your ear. Failing that, wet the back of your hand and pass it over the surface, or use soapy water and watch for bubbles.
3. Mark the hole the moment you find it. They are very hard to find twice.
4. Clean and dry the area, then apply the adhesive patch with as much pressure as you can manage for as long as you can stand, weighted overnight if the pitch allows.
5. Treat a field repair as temporary and redo it at home, where the adhesive can cure for a full day.

At home, submerge the pad section by section in a bath and mark every leak — there is often more than one. Clean with an alcohol wipe, use a proper urethane repair adhesive with the manufacturer patch, and leave it flat and weighted for the full cure time on the tube. Rushing the cure is why repairs fail twice.

Delamination is the exception. When the internal bonds let go the pad develops a bulge, and there is nothing to glue from the outside. That is a manufacturing failure rather than a wear item, so it is a warranty conversation, and many brands treat it as one. Sleeping pad R-values explains what you are protecting.

Be clear about what you are fixing. A waterproof fabric has two things going on: a coating that stops water passing through, and a durable water repellent finish on the outside that makes water bead and run off. The same product does not fix both.

Re-proofing restores the outer repellency, and that is worth doing: a fly that has stopped beading wets out, gets heavy and feels cold. It is a wash-in or spray-on product, usually activated by gentle warmth, and anyone can do it in half an hour. What it does not do is restore a failed coating. The hydrostatic head figures here — 1,200 mm to 5,000 mm across the flysheets, median 2,000 mm — describe the coating, and no spray puts those millimetres back once it is peeling.

• Wash before you re-proof. Dirt stops the treatment bonding, and a dirty fabric wets out faster whatever you put on it.
• Use a technical wash rather than household detergent on anything waterproof or insulated. Detergent residue attracts water, which is exactly the wrong outcome.
• Packs want a rinse, a soft brush and a dry in the shade. Do not machine-wash a framed pack, and check the hip belt stitching and buckles while you are there.

Some of these jobs are easy, and the shop price is mostly labour. Others are specialist, and attempting them is how a repairable item becomes a dead one.

The general rule: do the surface work yourself, and pay for anything that means sewing through a waterproof layer or opening an insulated chamber. And keep receipts. Several brands in this catalogue carry long warranties on manufacturing faults, and early delamination, seam failure and zip failure are usually exactly that.