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Serious question, did anyone else take 5 months to figure out their sleeping pad was leaking from the valve and not the seams?
I swear I spent almost 5 months chasing the wrong problem with my sleeping pad and it made me want to throw the thing in the lake. Every trip from June through October I kept waking up flat on the cold ground around 2am, and I was dead sure the seams were failing because that is what every forum thread tells you to check. I did the bathtub test at home 4 different times, dunked the whole pad section by section, and never saw a single bubble. I even bought a patch kit off Amazon for $12 and slapped patches on two spots that turned out to be totally fine. What actually fixed it was a tip from a guy at the REI in Denver who told me to fill the pad, close the valve, and then sit on it while listening right next to the valve with my ear on it. Took me 5 months and I felt like an idiot when I finally heard the tiny hiss coming out of the valve gasket, not the pad body at all. A $6 replacement valve stem and 10 minutes of work and the pad holds air all night now. So am I the only one who wasted a whole season blaming the fabric when it was the valve the whole time?
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