Down bag stoarge: hanging vs. lay flat vs. cotton bag, which is best?

i dont worry about it …

ask yourself if you store your down puffies in bags … i suspect not …

im am quite sure however that someone on BPL will tell you how down will get destroyed if you dont store em exactly in a certain specified way ;)

as long as it aint mouldy, damp, exposed to sunlight and squished more than a polar bear in a snow cave … it really doesnt matter

I store mine in a big cotton bag on a closet shelf.

I store my puffy stuff in the same bag.

Been doing it that way for decades and never had a problem.

It's hard to imagine any reason that laying bags flat on the ground damages the down, and the same reason wouldn't be a problem hanging. I guess the idea is to make sure people don't use the stuff sack as permanent storage, that's the no no.

Eric doesn't know what he is talking about.

You MUST store down items in a breathable bag that has a volume of 43% of the original lofted mass. This bag must be made of 64% cotton, 27% polyester, and 10% spider silk. Yes, that adds up to 101%, but hey, I didn't make up the rules. This is how things are. The room you have it in must face northwest with no fewer than 2 windows but the light they let in must not touch the down item. That room must also be 68*F at night and 71*F during the day. No more. No less. Humidity in that room must coincide with the tides. As the tides on the western shore of the US come in, you must drop the humidity by 5%. As the tides go out, you must raise the humidity 7% for the first two hours and drop it 2% after that.

Fail to do this and you'll completely ruin your down items.

Anyone else is wrong.

Now that's funny Travis ;-)

The cotton must be organic and the spider silk must come from free range spiders. Both the cotton and spider silk must be harvested by hippies from Vermont who are vegans and drink nothing but spring water.

apart from the LOL…

Logic says that when all is well these methods are the same…..but….
1) if you ever have leaks/exploded water pipe etc floor is susceptible (learned that the hard way w books…)
2) OTHER PEOPLE = bad….I have 2 young girls, the wife and the maid romp around the house and closets, and although they all know that my hiking gear is sacred and touching it is punishable by death – history has shown that people sometimes are willing to sacrifice their lives for a cause
3) SevenD/0.8Quantum + mistakes = snags=tears.

for all these reasons i keep ALL my puffy stuff (bags,jkts, balaclavas) in large cotton bags in closet high above the floor

YMMV

Couldn't agree more with Michael's points above. I do not like my bags touching the downstairs floor. They all hang inside their respective bags from hangers in a closet.

Thanks for the tips/humor. I especially liked the idea of free range spiders :D

I figured that the three options were pretty much the same if all things equal and safe. Just wanted to make sure there was not some little detail I had missed. I would not be surprised if someone on there had done some kind of testing which resulted in one option being slightly better than other.

I too have kids, plus a dumb, smelly cat. My gear closet in my office, and my office I keep under lock and key. So it's safe. Plus no pipes, it's on the 2nd floor of my house.

I feel like the retailers would definitely know best, and since I use FF I couldn't help but notice they store all of their bags in inventory on shelves, and in the big cotton bags.

Some bags can sit for quite some time (over a year if it is a big, -20 bag) so the fact that we actually break ours out frequently throughout the year is even better.