Sleeping Bag Care
Caring for your sleeping bag starts with proper storage. Never store your bag by stuffing it into its stuff sack and tossing it in the closet: the sustained compression of the insulation, whether down or a synthetic, will cause the bag to lose its loft. Instead, store your bag by hanging it in a closet or by placing it in the extra-large storage sack sold by most sleeping-bag manufacturers. Heat and compression combined are worse than compression alone. Don't store your stuffed bag in the trunk of your car during the summer, as you might be tempted to do if you are alternating backpacking pilgrimages with visits to city fleshpots during a two-week vacation.

You can also prolong your bag's life by keeping it clean. That means always sleeping in a tent or on a ground sheet, not directly on dirt, and wearing clothing when you go to bed. It's a lot easier to wash long underwear than it is to wash a sleeping bag. Spot-clean stained areas as soon as possible after they get dirty rather than washing the entire bag. Airing your bag in the sun for a few hours after each trip will help kill any musty odors that develop.

When your entire bag finally does need washing, usually after several seasons of hard use, take it to a commercial laundromat with a large-capacity, front-loading washing machine. Do not use a top-loading, agitator-type machine, which can easily ruin your bag through rough handling. Front-loading machines tumble your bag and put much less stress on batts of synthetic insulation and the fragile baffles that hold your down in place. Use a soap that dissolves well in the local water. Your goal is not only to get soap into the bag to get it clean, but to get all the soap back out. Soap residues in any bag can cause clumping of the insulation and loss of loft. Special down soaps dissolve easily and rinse out well, but aren't really necessary and may not be strong enough to remove stains from the shell. Dry-cleaning is not advisable. Some experts argue that dry-cleaning strips oil from down and makes it brittle. Others argue that few dry-cleaners take the care to make sure that all the dissolved dirt is rinsed out of the bag with clean solvent. In any case, the fumes from solvent residues can give you headaches or worse.

If you must wash your bag at home, fill a bathtub with warm water and a little soap. Immerse the bag gently, knead the soapy water into the bag, then drain and rinse repeatedly until no more soap bubbles percolate through the shell. Press – don't wring – the water from the bag and gently lift it from the tub. Wet down is heavy, and the weight of it can rip the baffles loose from their moorings if the bag is manhandled. Dry the bag in a tumble dryer on low heat, which can take several hours. Be sure the bag is thoroughly dry before storing it. With a down bag, you may need to fluff the bag vigorously to break up clumps of down and restore the full loft. Think of this as an exercise in feathering your own nest.

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