Testing and Comparing 6 Sleeping Pads (Backpacking Insulation Part 1)

this video series is made possible by backcountry.com what's going on guys it's paul here and this is going to be the first video in a four video series all around the topic of backpacking insulation so in this video we're going to be talking about sleeping pads six different sleeping pads to be exact now of course i'm going to cover some of the differences between these six pads but i mostly just want you to be able to make as educated of a decision as possible the next time that you go to purchase a sleeping pad so i'm also going to dive into things like r-value and why you might need an insulated sleeping pad as well as how insulation insulates also this nerd is super excited because i was able to get my hands on a thermal camera so we can do a little experiment and actually see the insulating effects of these pads so let's jump right in and i'll start by introducing you to today's contestants but one thing that you'll notice as i go through these is that i'm only covering inflatable sleeping pads in this video so if you want to see me do another video in the future where i do something similar with foam or self-inflating pads then leave a comment below and let me know okay here are the sleeping pads that we'll be going over in this video starting with the climate static v they have many different versions of this pad but this one is the standard non-insulated version which has an r-value of 1.4 next up is the therm-a-rest neoair uber light which has an r-value of 2.3 and then we have the c to summit etherlight xt this is the insulated version which has an r value of 3.2 after that is the nemo tensor this is also an insulated version with an r value of 3.5 and then we have the climate static v this is the ultralight insulated version which has a claimed r value of 4.4 more on that claimed our value later and finally we have the thermarest neoair x therm with its famous r value of 6.9 now before i continue on with the specs of each of these pads i want to quickly go over what's included with each one and all of these pads come with some type of repair or patch kit so if you do puncture a hole in one you have a way to patch that they also all come with some type of stuff sack this is the stuff sack for the uber light this is the stuff sack for the neoair x therm and both therm-a-rest pads also come with a pump sack now if you're not familiar with pump sacks essentially you just connect one end to the inflation valve of the pad and then on the other end it's a nice wide opening that you can blow into from a little distance away and doing that also sucks the surrounding air into the pump sack and it just allows you to inflate the pad a lot faster and easier so you don't end up with that lightheaded feeling like you're about to pass out for the nemo tensor it comes with a stuff sack that has a little pocket on the inside to store your patch kit and then it also comes with a pump sack and the nemo also comes with a little velcro strap so if you want to you can just entirely ditch the stuff sack and wrap it up with a velcro strap now the seat of summit ether light is a little bit different and i really like this design because this is the stuff sack you just pull the sleeping pad out of this end but this also doubles as a pump sack so it's one piece of gear you just open the other end and pull out the rest of the inflation bag and then we have the two climate sleeping pads which only come with a stuff sack so they don't include any type of pump sack but at least this does have the little pocket on the inside to store your patch kit if you want to this is the one for the insulated ultralight the standard static v i've had since 2013 and i lost the stuff sack for that one a long time ago okay in the interest of time with this many sleeping pads i'm only going to talk about key differences between the specs but i will have everything listed on the screen so feel free to pause the video at any point if you want to know more starting off we have the material used on the outside of each pad and the main thing that i'll highlight here is that the x therm is the only one to utilize two different materials for the top and bottom of the pad next is the inflated size and most all of these sleeping pads are available in various sizes with all the ones that we're looking at today being the regular size except for the nemo tensor which is a long and wide version here is the thickness of each pad with most of them being two and a half inches other than the nemo at three inches and the ether light at four inches with each sleeping pad packed down into its stuff sack other than my old static v here is the length and here is the pack down diameter and here are the weights for each pad you may notice that these weights differ slightly from what is posted online and that's because all of this is according to my scale at home and the main things that i want to point out on this page are that the uber light is by far the lightest pad coming in at a total weight of 10.7 ounces now on the opposite end of the spectrum is the nemo tensor coming in the heaviest at 23.5 ounces however keep in mind that that is for the long and wide version if you were to go with the regular version which is about the same size as the rest of these pads that one comes in at a total weight of 17.8 ounces making it almost the exact same weight as the x therm and now for what is probably the most important detail the cheapest option is the standard static v coming in at 55 and the most expensive is the x therm coming in at 2 15. now all of these sleeping pads are available over on backcountry.com as well as many other great sleeping pads for example if you're looking for say a cheaper alternative to the nemo tensor check out the nemo astro which is available in an insulated and non-insulated version it's a little bit different from the tensor but it is about 60 dollars cheaper and if you need any help selecting the right gear for you you can always chat with the back country gear head the gear heads have personal experience in the outdoors and they'll be able to recommend some great options specific to your needs so be sure to check out backcountry at the link in the description below and thank you backcountry for making this video possible now as for the warmth of sleeping pads there are a few manufacturers that used to use temperature ratings just like what you would see with sleeping bags and quilts but just about a year ago a new international astm standard was adopted for the testing of r-value for sleeping pads and since that time most all manufacturers have switched to using r-value as a metric to indicate how warm a sleeping pad is so the r in r-value stands for resistance specifically thermal resistance and to give you a little bit better idea of why that's used to measure sleeping pads temperatures are always trying to find equilibrium which i'm sure you've experienced if you've ever set a hot cup of coffee out on the table you come back an hour later and find that it's room temperature it's because those two different temperatures have equalized well it's the same way when you're backpacking and your body is generating a lot of heat that heat is constantly trying to escape your body to mix with the cold air around it that's where resistance comes in to try to resist that heat from escaping and the colder it is outside the more that heat from your body wants to escape which is when you have to increase resistance or increase r value and you now know most everything that it took us almost five months to cover in my heat transfer classes so other than just providing a soft space to lay on the ground your sleeping pad serves the same purpose as your sleeping bag your jacket your gloves they all serve the purpose of increasing thermal resistance now my best guess for why they use r-value instead of a temperature rating for sleeping pads is that oftentimes the ground temperature can vary from the air temperature sometimes only by a couple of degrees but sometimes by 10 degrees or more so if you used air temperature to judge how warm of a pad you need you could still end up freezing at night now i'm about to go through all the different insulation techniques used in each of these pads but as i'm going through that one last little bit of science that i want you to keep in mind is that when it's cold your body loses heat in four primary ways the first way is through respiration so that just means that you're inhaling cold air and exhaling body heat essentially so one little tip there is that if you are in really cold weather you can wear a balaclava at night to help trap in some of that heat the other method is through conduction which just means that's surface to surface heat transfer then there's convection which is where you lose heat to the surrounding air and then finally there's radiation which is where you lose heat through infrared rays now the reason i say all of that is because different types of insulation are better at resisting different types of heat loss and you lose 65 percent of your body heat just through radiation alone so if you're looking for a sleeping pad with the highest warmth to weight ratio you definitely want to go with something that has a reflective material on the inside of the pad that's made for reflecting radiative heat a perfect example of that is the neoair x therm so the x therm has been a very popular sleeping pad for cold weather backpackers because it has a 6.9 r value which is crazy high for an inflatable sleeping pad and it weighs less than a pound so really crazy warmth to weight ratio and that is accomplished because on the inside of this pad they have what they call a triangular core matrix that's designed to trap convective heat but more specifically for this pad it has a layer of what therm-a-rest calls therma-capture i believe is their patent-pending material that is designed to reflect radiative heat loss and like i said because you lose most of your heat that way that's why this pad is able to accomplish such a high r value next up or technically down in r value is the climate static v insulated they have a couple different versions this one is the ultra light and this one takes an entirely different approach to insulation so from what i can tell there's no reflective material at all it uses basically a synthetic insulation like you would find in a synthetic jacket for example in these chambers to give it its insulation now climate has this listed as an r value of 4.4 but i'm really interested to see when we do the thermal camera test what this pad looks like because from what i can tell climate has not yet done testing to the astm standards for r value so i have a feeling that it might be a little lower than a 4.4 also between these v-shaped chambers there's no insulation right here so i think from personal experience that there's going to be a good bit of heat loss through that next up is the insulated nemo tensor which they also sell an uninsulated version of this pad if you're interested in that but this one takes a more similar approach to insulation as the neoair x therm in that it doesn't have any type of a plush like a synthetic insulation on the inside instead it uses a reflective material if i remember correctly it has two layers of a reflective material on the inside but my best guess for why this is an r 3.5 and this has an r value of 6.9 is that hopefully you can see this here you can see there are little holes through that insulative material for the baffle design so that's going to allow a little bit of heat loss through that but still this is an r 3.5 which should be perfectly fine for most all three season use after the nemo tensor we have the sea to summit etherlight which has an r value of 3.2 and what's really interesting about this pad is that it uses a hybrid of both types of materials so it has a layer of a reflective material on the inside for that radiative heat loss but then it also has some plush synthetic material as well after that we have the other neo this is the neoair uber light which is the lightest sleeping pad of the whole bunch it has an r value of 2.3 and it's very similar in design to the neoair x therm the main difference is just the materials so it's a thinner outer material and then it does not have that reflective material on the inside for that radiative heat but it does still have the same triangular core matrix design of the inner baffles to reflect convective heat and finally we have the sleeping pad that's been with me for so long i kind of feel like it's the 35 year old that never moved out of its parents house this is the climate static v this is uninsulated so it has an r value of 1.4 again climate i don't think has tested theirs to the new standard but being that it's uninsulated i would say 1.4 is probably about accurate meaning that there is no insulation anywhere in here it's just the air chambers but i am kind of expecting that there will be some heat loss between these v-shaped chambers so now that you know more than you ever wanted to know about sleeping pad insulation let's go do some testing okay for my quick experiment i've moved out into the garage so please excuse the horrible echo that i'm sure you hear in this audio but just to give you a little overview of my very rudimentary test setup what i have here is my 3d printer and if you haven't seen my recent video about 3d printed backpacking gear i'll link that up above if you're interested in that but basically what i've done is i have removed the build plate from the 3d printer it's still connected through wiring i've just removed it from the rest of the printer and the reason that i've done that is that on the printer i can dial in that heated bed to whatever temperature i want so i'm going to set that to 37 degrees celsius roughly human body temperature and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to take each pad individually and i'll lay one end over that heated bed i'm going to set a timer for two minutes and then after two minutes i'm going to use the thermal camera and just kind of see how much of the heat has escaped to the other side of the pad so we'll see what temperatures we're getting there also i have the kestrel drop d3 over here just to log the ambient temperature and humidity while i'm time lapsing through these tests i just quickly went to throw out that this test is not being done in a lab with specialized highly sensitive equipment so i am not able to do things like test r-value to astm standards however this should give us some pretty interesting relative results and i'm hopeful that it will also give me something that i can compare other sleep systems to in the future and here are the results from each test starting in the top left corner we have the uninsulated static v which you can make out the v-shaped air chambers here with the hot spot being between those two chambers and after two minutes it hit a maximum temperature of 78.6 degrees fahrenheit after that in the middle at the top we have the uber light which is an r 2.3 and you can see the hot spots for that one passing through between the baffles but that one still did pretty well at a maximum temperature of 70.1 degrees after that was the ether light and this one was interesting you can see the hot spots in the the dimples of the pad there but it hit a maximum temperature after two minutes of 65.1 degrees and being an r value of 3.2 that's kind of interesting being that the next test was the nemo tensor on the bottom left here which is an r value of 3.5 but it actually hit a higher maximum temperature than the ether light that is possibly due to the fact that the ether light is a thicker pad than the tensor after that we have the static v ultralight on the bottom and the middle and this was the one i was really interested to test and as i suspected there was a good bit of heat passing through between the chambers here hitting 73 degrees fahrenheit so that actually tested worse as far as the hot spot goes than the uber light of an r value of 2.3 although you can see that in the v-shaped chambers themselves the insulation worked pretty well but there was a good bit of heat loss between the chambers and finally on the bottom right we have the 6.9 r value neoair x therm which after two minutes hit a maximum temperature of 63.8 degrees now i did expect this pad to do a little better than that however keep in mind that that temperature is really not much higher than the ambient temperature so if this had been done in a colder environment this pad probably would have stood out a little more from the rest of these one other thing that i found really interesting in my testing was that heat dissipated at different rates with different pads so in this little test i have the uber light on the left and the x therm on the right i placed my arms on both pads for about 10 seconds and when i lifted them up the residual heat lasted for about 30 seconds on the uber light whereas it lasted for almost a minute with the x therm i'm guessing that this has something to do with the fact that the material is twice as thick on the x therm as it is on the uber light now this would not be an adequate sleeping pad video if i did not touch on comfort and noise and i'm kind of wrapping those two together because if you're sensitive to noise then it doesn't matter how comfortable a pad is if it's so loud that it's going to keep you up all night so with that said i'll start off by saying i don't find any of these sleeping pads uncomfortable i sleep pretty well on all of these but with that said if i had to pick the one that i would say is the least comfortable it would be the uninsulated static v i am very much a side sleeper and this is not a very thick pad which when i initially go to bed it's perfectly fine but if it gets colder at night and the pad loses a little bit of air pressure then i'll find that sometimes my hip or my shoulder or arm will end up touching the ground and the other factors of comfort for this are that the material they use is a fairly stiff material so it's just not super comfortable especially against bare skin which being that this is an uninsulated pad it's a lot more likely that you're going to be using it in the summertime when you might be bare skin on a sleeping pad and that stiff material gives it a little bit of a crinkly noise next up i would say is the static v ultralite which again i've gotten some pretty good sleep on this sleeping pad it's just that it's not quite as thick as i would say is ideal for a side sleeper and i'm comparing it to some very comfortable pads but this sleeping pad does use a much lower denier material than the standard static v so it's very comfortable much softer material and because of that the material itself by that test is very quiet but this pad does something really weird that i've never seen any other sleeping pad do as i move around on it i guess just because the air moving from one chamber to the next it makes a weird little squeaky sound and i'll splice that in here [Music] next up in comfort i would say are the two therm-a-rest pads so the uber light and the x-therm they're decent i would give them maybe a 7 out of 10 for comfort with a slight edge to the uber light mostly because it has a lower denier softer fabric than the x therm which typically you're going to be using the x thumb in such cold weather that you're probably wearing multiple layers anyway so i don't know if that matters much but i haven't had any issues with bottoming out or touching the ground with either of these pads the primary issue i've found with this design probably because of the horizontal baffles is that i find that i tend to roll around a little bit more at night than i do with some of the other baffle designs but when it comes to noise both of these pads are pretty well known for sounding like you're sleeping on a chip bag so for example with this one because of that foil material that they have on the inside of the baffles it makes it really noisy and even more so i would say for the x therm if you remember back a couple years ago when everybody was hating on sun chips for really loud bags it sounds like that's what they put on the inside of this pad so if you're highly sensitive to noise these two are probably not the pad for you and finally by far the most comfortable inflatable pads i've ever used i would call it a tie between the nemo tensor and the ceta summit etherlight the ether light is a little bit thicker than the nemo tensor so if you're looking for the thickest pad possible go with the ether light but i haven't had any issues with bottoming out on the nemo tensor very comfortable pads i sleep really well on both of these and as for noise i would say that they're probably about as good as you can get for a decent inflatable pad for the nemo every once in a while you can hear that reflective film on the inside it's very slight not bad at all and then a little bit of crunchy sound with the ether light but once again not that bad so if you've held on with me all the way to this point in the video would you do me a favor and give the video a like it really helps out the channel also you can subscribe i will have the subsequent parts in this installation video series posting very soon with more information and nerdy testing so you can click the little bell icon if you want to be notified when those videos go live thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: GearTest Outdoors

Views: 157,486

Rating: 4.9619336 out of 5

Keywords: Gear, Test, GearTest, Geartest.tv, Backpacking, Kayaking, Hiking, Hunting, Camping, Outdoor, Canoeing, Canoe, Kayak, Light, Ultralight, Weight, Camp, AT, Appalachian, Trail, Overnight, Weekend, Review, Wilderness, Survival, Backpack, ULTRALIGHT, ultra, UL, budget, thru, hike, thruhike, Beginner, Sleeping, Pad, Mat, Bed, Warmth, Cold, Bag, Comparison, Sleep, Backcountry, Thermarest, NEMO, Klymit, Tensor, X-Therm, XTherm, Uberlite, R-Value, R Value, Insulation, Ether, XT, Insulated, Neoair, Static V, Heat, Loss, Outdoors, Pads, Best, Mats, Inflatable, S2S

Id: e2H8EYHvF3U

Length: 22min 23sec (1343 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/lakorai]

Interesting comparison video of different backpacking pads.

The models that lose the most to heat loss are Klymit with the V shaped baffles and Sea to Summit with their quilted welded baffles.

The winner on top of course is the Thermorest Xtherm and the Exped pads.

[u/LeadFreePaint]

So something that should be pointed about about the Klymit pads is that where you see the heat loss is where your sleeping bag will loft up. I took my summer Klymit pad into the first month of winter without issue. It was only when the permafrost set in that I had to swap it out.

[u/GLaDOSdidnothinwrong]

First, I must agree with fuck backcountry.com

Second - great idea on the testing! Engineer that deals with thermography here. As mentioned in the YouTube comments, the peak temps you're seeing will vary depending on the surface emissivity, so a more accurate gauge of a pads insulation would be to look at the delta between the cold and hot spots on the pad. For most of the pads you tested, it looks like that aligns with the R-Value, but we should keep in mind a tiny hot spot is going to let less heat out than a large one.

[u/freezeinginchicago]

Fuck Backcountry.com

Also the staticV sucks