Rab Q600 or Marmot Helium ?

http://www.triplezero.fr/duvets_couettes.php

Buon Jour,

Your English is certainly better than my French :)! No worries, all are welcome here.

My experience is with the Phantom 15, and I highly recommend all the bags in the Phantom line. I find the bag to fit me very comfortably, and I like the way the hood fits. I am 5'9" and use the regular length.I am a warm sleeper and for me I find that I can exceed the temperature rating easily with minimal clothing.

The other bags in question have a good reputation, but I have no experience with them, other than acquantances who owned the Helium and were in love with it.

I actually have the Marmot Helium EQ, which I have seam sealed.

My bag is the 2007 model and has a full length zipper vs. the shorter zipper of the Helium, which is nice if you are too hot in the bag.

I sleep cold and have used the bag year round.

A few months ago, I sleep outside in temperatures around -2 degrees Celsius without a tent or bivy bag.

Laying my clothing inside of the bag to enhance the warmth of the bag, I found that I was too hot and had to strip down to just my base layer to be comfortable.

One other experience that I had was in my Contrail Tarptent in a rain storm with very strong winds.

I failed to secure my stakes and one of them pulled up out of the muddy ground and water rushed into the tent.

I could not leave my tent as it would have been blown away, so I just curled up inside of the Helium EQ and cinched the opening up tight to keep spray from getting into my bag.

Basically, I spent the night in about a half of inch of water.

Thank god I seam sealed my bag….I stayed completely warm and dry the entire night, despite being completely wet on the outside.

In the morning, I looked like Han Solo in carbonite with my tent collapsed on top of me with small pools of water puddling on top of the tent.

This month, I am going to be taking my Helium EQ into the snow with a Mountain Laurel Designs Soul Side Zip eVent top bivy. (I have signed up for a snow camping class with the Sierra Club).

The hope is that the bivy will enhance the warmth of my sleeping system.

I am expecting to sleep in a snow trench, using my MLD poncho tarp as the cover for the top of my trench.

With any luck, I won't turn into a Popsicle. :)

Anyway, I can not say enough good things about my Helium EQ.

My friend has the Helium and likes it, but he has commented that he would like to have the full length zipper to cool him down in warmer weather.

By the way, I am 5 ft 7 inches tall and I am 140 lbs.

If you decide to get the EQ and decide to seam seal it, make sure that you apply talcum/baby powder to the seams when you are done, otherwise the seams will stick to each other when you stuff the bag into your compression sag. When dry, the seal sealer is a bit sticky/tacky and the baby powder eliminates that problem.

Hope that this helps you.

Thanks a lot for giving time and reply to my questions.

I must look more accuratly maybe to the fantom line. Maybe that will increase my chance to find a good bargain on the net.

The new version of the helium seems to be nice to with a full zipper.
Another question concerning the EQ coating, is the way that down can dry when it's wet because of perspiration.
For a short day period, I'm afraid that down will loose his fluffy aspect. And won't dry quick enough as if the liner was non coated…
Anyway, maybe the answer is a vapor barrier…

Nonetheless… need to try to find the last version of these three bags in a good deal on the net…

And thanks for my english… I need now to try to use imperial system.

Si if I'm 1.82 m high, it means I 6 foot high, and the regular size is ok. Am I right ? :))

And… Ian Solo I hope you'd become a Jedi soon… ;)

The regular length is 6 ft and I believe that the long version is 6 ft 6 inches.

Other than a vapor barrier to keep moisture from reducing the loft of your down, the only option would be to dry out your bag in the sun for a few minutes each day.

Another nice thing about the Helium is the interior liner of the bag is just silky smooth and feel nice.

Tony,

Can you elaborate on how you went about seam sealing your Helium EQ?

Thanks,
PLR

( Ancelin – Sorry about stealing your thread :) )

Don't worry about the post stelling… ;)

I'm also interested by that technique anyway…

Tony, do you have some problems to dry your down during your trips with your EQ ?

Paul,

It was painfully slow.

Literally hours of work with my wife and I taking a few days.

We laid out the sleeping bag on our rectangular dinning table.

I would press down on a section of the sleeping bag with both hands and "stretched" out the fabric so that the seam was in the middle of my two hands and the line of stitches was flat and taught/straight.

My wife (bless her for putting up with my anal retentiveness and compulsive behaviors!) then would squeeze out some Seam Grip Sealer onto the small brush that came with the tube of Seam Grip.

She would then lightly brush some of it along the seam.

She would carefully thin out the sealant with multiple small brush strokes.

In the beginning it was a thick, wide line of sealant.

As we got the hang of it, the line of sealant needed was just a little wider than the seam.

We made a point of making sure that there were no "dry" spots along the stitching, which would be the tell tale sign that we missed a spot….due to my not stretching the seam out with my hands.

We had to do only a few feet at a time because we had to be very careful that the parts of the bag that we had finished did not end up sticking to other parts of the sleeping bag shell or to itself if the fabric folded up on itself.

The hard part was doing the head and foot ends of the bag.

The seams along the top and bottom that went horizontally across the bag on the top and bottom (across the chest left to right) and the vertical seams that went head to foot along the zipper for example were the easy ones.

In order to seam seal the head and foot area required that I "inflate" the head area so that it could keep its shape.

To do this, I used my bear vault….sometimes a really big book like an unabridged dictionary. At times, I hand to unzip the full length zipper and reached inside the bag to use my hand to hold the "back" of the seal that I was trying to seal.

In the case of the head and foot area, I left the bear vault into the bag to keep those areas from "deflating", which could result in the seam folding over on itself and having the mess of the sealant sticking to itself….pulling those apart would tear away the Seam Grim and ruin that area.

Fortunately, that did not happen often.

The next morning, I found that the sealant was tacky/sticky to the touch.

To solve this problem was easy, but a bit messy.

Once all of the seams had been sealed (2 or 3 day process), I took the whole bag to my bath tub.

Using a small brush, I would take a small cup of baby powder and I dipped the brush into the baby powder.

Then I would lightly dust/brush the seams to coat the Seam Grip.

This would adhere to the Seam Grip and eliminate the tackiness.

This is critical….without the baby powder, I found that the Seam Grip would stick to any other part of the bag that had Seam Grip and would/could tear away the seam sealing that I had previously done.

Once I had dusted my entire bag, it had a chalky look to it….I had to shake off or beat as much of the powder off as possible.

To be honest, my bag does not look pretty anymore and my friends look at my bag as if I had ruined it.

I kinda agree with them, but fact is that I would rather have performance over looks and it isn't a beauty contest when you are out there with the bears and squirrels. :)

I am sure that this could be done with one person, but having someone else makes it go a lot faster and the results would probably be better.

Since doing this to my Helium EQ we have done this to my wife's Mountain Hardware Phantom 15 with good results…cleaner looking than my bag with smaller and tighter lines on the seam.

It is also hard on the hands to keep the fabric and seams flat and taught to allow for a good line of sealant to be put down.

Hope this helps.

Ancelin,

I have not had a problem, but to be honest, I have not been in a situation where I was subject to sustained rain or humidity.

The longest that I have used my Helium EQ was for 4 days while doing the High Sierra Trail from Sequoia National to the top of Mt. Whitney. (70 miles total length, a personal best for me!)

This was this past Sept….temps were really warm and often the bag was too warm.

The only time that I really was thankful to have it was at 11,000 ft at Guitar Lake.

Conditions were dry and cold….the temperatures must have dipped down to freezing at 32 degrees F.

In the morning there was a thin layer of ice in our Platypus bags.

During that entire trip, I did not find that my bag felt heavy with moisture and the down did not fail to keep me warm.

Another trip in Yosemite in July of last year, I did a 4 day, 50 mile hike.

I did experience two nights where were was significant condensation while we were in a low lying valley.

I hand condensation raining down from the top of my Contrail and some sagging of the top of the tent that then touched the top of my bag. (My failure to retention the lines on the tent before going to bed was to blame, not the tarptent).

Each time that happened, I would lay my bag out in the early morning sun while making breakfast and breaking down my tent.

I found that just those few minutes in the tent dried up the bag nicely and the bag felt dry when I stuffed it in my compression bag and felt dry when I pulled it out later the next evening.

If this matters, when I sleep, I do make a point of sleeping with light thermal pants, my long sleeve hiking shirt, and a thin pair of sock liners.

I have sensitive skin and I am prone to heat rashes, so I need to keep my skin dry….maybe wearing the line layers helps with disapating the moisture???

Thus far, I have not had any problems with my down bag failing due to moisture.

After sleeping in my collapsed tarp tent in a rain storm with a half inch of water all around me, I am pretty paranoid about water.

When I was in college, I had an experience with a wet down bag, so I specifically wanted a sleeping bag that was waterproof.

I just bought a MLD Soul Side Zip Bivy with the eVent top.

Combined with the Helium EQ, it is a bit of overkill, but I am paranoid about getting wet.

Again, hope that this helps.

Sure Tony, that helps me of course…You give me good points for the marmot Helium EQ…

I'm now trying to fond the good bargain on the net…

Anyway, that was nice reading you about your trips… I hope i'll go back again in the west…

See you.

I wonder if a 1:1 solution of GE Silicone II and mineral spirits would work better than seam grip, by that I mean goes on smoother, just as waterproof, and a lot less tacky after it dries. Probably a lot more mixing of small amounts and a stronger contact high.

Thanks Tony for the excellent description!

PLR