My Kelty sleeping bag vs a cheap Ozark Trail one in 30 degree weather

Last month I camped up at Big Bear and brought my old Kelty cosmic 20. My buddy had a $40 Ozark Trail bag from Walmart. First night hit 32 and I woke up warm while he was shivering by 3am. We checked the fill and his had way less insulation packed in. Anyone else notice a massive difference between budget bags and mid-range ones?

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3 Comments

theaward5mo ago

Hang on though, I gotta push back on this a little. I've taken a $30 Ozark Trail bag down to the mid 20s a few times and slept fine. It's not that the bag is bad, it's that people don't treat cheap bags right. Most of those cheap ones rely on you wearing good base layers and using a proper pad with a decent R-value. If your buddy was just in cotton sweats on a foam pad, no wonder he froze. I've also found that if you stuff a cheap bag into a compression sack too tight for weeks, the fill clumps up and loses its loft. My buddy's Ozark Trail one actually kept me warmer than my old Kelty one time because I fluffed it out for an hour before bed.

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jason5245mo ago

Oh man, are we really overthinking this... It's a sleeping bag, not a space suit. @theaward put more effort into that reply than most people put into their whole camping trip.

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piperr583mo ago

Wait, did he actually say he fluffed a cheap bag for a full hour before bed? That's way more work than most people want to do after a long hike. It might work, but you shouldn't have to treat a sleeping bag like a soufflé just to stay warm.

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