Should we as a community start collecting sleeping system vs conditions vs comfort data?

This is the kind of neurotic thinking that I go backpacking to get away from (mine and others). Relax. Maybe drink less coffee??? You seem to be trying to circumvent the time and effort to get the necessary experience. Taking time to get the experience over the years is most of the fun… patience, my friend. billy

Haha. I don't drink coffee ;). I think learning from the experience of others is extremely valuable, be it with qualitative or quantitative data. But, each to their own.

then maybe you should consider some Valium? :) But, really… you could spend years charting all the information you want on comfort relative to sleeping bags at various temperatures… what you will get is a spectrum of responses… but it will not tell you where you lie on the spectrum. Everyone is different. Some people sleep cold, some hot. The temp ratings put out by the makers of the sleeping bags attempt to get somewhere near the average… but still will not tell you what temp sleeping bag you will be comfortable in at any given temp. That only comes with experience. Anyway, it's much more fun to get the experience than put together and read charts… or perhaps you could just stay home and do charts… maybe you're a charge guy and not a backpacking guy… But everyone seems to want to be an expert right away… without working for the experience… but data does not equal experience… sorry, but it takes time and experience in the field. However, as a rule of thumb… I recommend that if you plan to camp in, say, 20F weather. Get try a 10F rated bag… 1) weather forecasts can be wrong by at least 10F and 2) many people will be cold in a 20F bag at 20F… Though others will be hot… it's better to be hot and have to unzip the bag than to be cold and have to shiver all night. You can't put that kind of wisdom on a chart. billy

Temperature is just one factor. Wind, humidity, ground composition, daily sun exposure, sleeping pad, shelter and personal metabolism abd subjectivity are just some of the confounding vairables. It is barely possible to do in a lab.

Absolutely Dale, there are a lot of factors that make this complex. But the aim isn't perfection, it's good enough to be useful. It might be that the effort required to get good-enough-to-be-useful isn't worth it. I'm not sure. Personally, as my spreadsheet of nights out grows I'm finding it useful. At the very least it helps me not forget. I can see what I took last time for similar conditions, and see if I was too hot or too cold. My idea is that other peoples data points would increase the value of my dataset, sure, a lot of people would sleep too hot to be applicable to me – but I'd find some people who had a similar comfort zone to me, and observe how they felt in various conditions and factor that in when I'm planning for similar conditions. Imagine you were going to the South Pole, despite the million confounding factors wouldn't you consider it incredibly useful to know what previous people took? And how they fared?

I too think such a database could be interesting. Although, anecdotally we are all different sleepers, it would be interesting to see how close we really are. Of course, the data collected would be critical, and a general body type could prove to shed light on the subject (i.e. a 5th percentile female vs a 95th percentile male would be quite different sleepers, I would guess).

In my case, blocks of time off are limited, and money is limited. It would be great to get all that experience, but to get it I need time and a variety of gear, I don't have that. I don't want to needlessly buy or carry gear I don't need, often not carrying enough has some strong penalty, I may not be able to procure more where I am, the disrupted nights sleep have ramifications for activities during the day. Sure, we all lay on a spectrum somewhere. Once you get a feeling for where you sit on that spectrum (which is only possible by knowing where others sit on it) can the advice of others be useful. If EE says thats a 10F quilt, thats a single data point, from EE, does that apply to me? When they say that, what mat were they using? What were they wearing? Did they have a high calorie intake that that night? How breeze was their shelter? We all use various small bits of data, the R value of mats, the manufacturers recommended sleep temps, various rules of thumb, or we ask people and they say "It was X degrees F and I had Y and it was fine". Take some of the posts in the GEAR forum at the moment, that could benefit from a collection of data points: "How much *fill weight* for PCT quilt?" "Two Quilts at Once?" "Cold Female sleeper needs warmer bag for all seasons! WM Versalite or Antelope?" "Another Quilt Question…" The current way we exchange these data points at the moment seems to be someone makes a query, and then the community replies in the thread with comments of their own data points. The original poster collects that information, then acts on it. At the moment all this stuff is out there nested in threads, hard to find and collect, and hard to use. Somewhat ironically you provide a rule of thumb that's likely data derived, but seemingly oppose my ambition to derive my own things from the data :P

Could a formal be created that would account for the info based on whether the person considers themselves a warm/cold sleeper? That way the info would have some perspective (subjective) at least about the type of person using the sleep system.

>>>But everyone seems to want to be an expert right away… without working for the experience… but data does not equal experience… sorry, but it takes time and experience in the field. +1

Isn't this what sleeping bag ratings do anyway? I have a 20 degree bag, my wife has a 15. I always wear fewer clothes than she does at night. She gets cold more than I do on our trips. OK, so we know that. If we're going to sub zero temps, we need warmer bags. If we're going on a warm weekend in the Sierra, we'll take lighter bags, or sleep with them open. A huge database of anecdotes from these boards won't change that…

What you end up with is a series of reviews, which isn't a bad thing, especially when some manufacturer's pull their figures out of a hat, weights included. But it's not science.

Great idea, but I bet it would turn into a list of anecdotal tales. You'd need 'vetted' measurement takers.

http://www.mammut.ch/documents/Schlafsaecke/Downloads/Sleep%20Well/Mammut_Sleep_well_pt1_E.pdf ;)

Another couple of factors that come into play is conditioning as well as experience. If at home it has been 50f at night and you camp where it is 20f you will feel colder than if your own home temp was 40f. Experience has to do with simple things like going to bed warm and trying not to sweat. It can also have to do with not fearing to be cold that is feeling that you are cold out of insecurity rather than the temperature. So I am also of the opinion that numbers don't make up for lack of experience in fact they can make things worse.

Eric, that's an interesting pdf there, but skimming through it I found precious few references to the sleeping pad/ground insulation (p 22 there is a "mattress" mention) which I find (and just about everybody here knows) is an extremely critical and integral element of the system. p26 >>Similarly, there has been criticism that the sleeping mat used in EN 13537 is too thick. However, the insulative properties of sleeping mat and the clothing must be fixed in order to make the test reproducible in different test houses. It would become impossible to compare the results between sleeping bags if different sleeping mats and clothing were specified for different temperature ranges. p33 >>Select your sleeping bag with enough safety margins for the trip you are planning. Invest in a Good Sleeping Mat A good sleeping mat will insulate you from the ground and provide comfortable padding. If you do not use a mat, you will lose a lot of heat through conduction. This requires an adjunct study!

If we as a community are going to pool our experiences and data, is this the best use of our time and resources? This an honest question – I don't have an alternative, although water consumption vs temperature might be suitable – lots of variables in that area as well. Personally, I find the sleeping cold problem relatively trivial. Plan ahead and carry a wee bit extra. If you have blown it, you will simply get up early, get the fires going, and get an early start on the day. I havelots of SAR experience to validate that result…Water consumption, especially in high temperature, is much more serious.

No We couldn't even get a paleo cookbook together Won't happen. Just take a bit more than you think you need. +1

Hmm, fair enough, sounds like there's not enough interest for me to build anything that supports a collaboration component. I'll collect information for my own purposes :)