Outdoor Vitals Vantage Alpine Puffer Jacket Review: Perfect Spring Puffer

I'll confess I would person a nerdy admiration for ExpeDry down adjacent if it didn't work, conscionable for its usage of basal chemistry, which adjacent I dimly retrieve from precocious schoolhouse but for immoderate crushed ne'er made it into a merchandise until recently. What's adjacent amended is that it does work.

I don't person a lab, and I'm not peculiarly funny successful what happens successful 1 anyway, but I americium a backpacker, surviving successful a acold climate, with a heavy dislike for being cold. In the existent world, wherever I live, if your overgarment loses loft and you get cold, atrocious things happen. In my testing, the Vantage overgarment loses astir nary loft passim the day, adjacent erstwhile I americium progressive and sweating successful it.

Better Than DWR?

Outdoor Vitals is not the archetypal to usage ExpeDry. Marmot, Katabatic Gear, and galore others besides person assorted sleeping bags and jackets with ExpeDry down, but the Vantage is the archetypal clip I person noticed a existent difference. The Vantage has little capable than respective different puffer jackets I deterioration regularly, yet keeps maine conscionable arsenic warm, if not warmer, acknowledgment successful portion to precise small nonaccomplishment of loft passim the day.

Proponents of ExpeDry besides assertion that it volition past longer than DWR coated down (whether chemically coated oregon wax coated) conscionable due to the fact that it's not coated, and truthful volition clasp its loft longer. I haven't utilized immoderate ExpeDry down products agelong capable to enactment this to trial yet, but based connected my acquisition with the Vantage Alpine overgarment and the mode it holds loft nether adverse conditions, this assertion makes sense.

The 2nd happening that Vantage uses to mitigate vigor nonaccomplishment is Outdoor Vital's Nova Zero Stitch fabric, which, arsenic the sanction suggests, uses nary stitches. There are inactive baffles to support the down successful place, but alternatively of punching thousands of small holes arsenic you would stitching, the baffles and different seams are woven into the fabric. Where the accepted method has an interior and outer cloth that is past either stitched (or bonded/welded), the Zero Stitch cloth is 2 pieces that are woven together. It's hard to visualize however this works, but Outdoor Vitals enactment retired a video to explain.