New Supercritical CO2 cleaning service for gear

What’s your concern regarding water?

Would love to hear the results.

I wonder if removing all the oils from down is a good idea. Thinking: aren’t goose and duck natural oils part of the reason that their feathers and down allow them to be water birds??? Agree with the question: “What’s your concern with water?”  because, ducks and geese and their feathers and down evolved to be water resistant… so that their helpful oils are not washed away????  I don’t know these things for fact, but would be concerned about removing any of the non-human oils… which I would think are mostly on the outer shell?

I have a pretty dirty quilt I was thinking about sending in. Would love to hear someone’s experience with this before trying it myself.

Washing a down blanket or sleeping bag in a front loader is pretty easy. Drying takes bloody forever though. I probably wouldn’t pay to send it anywhere, nor try a new cleaning method.Gotta go with tried and true for expensive gear.

Drying is a process. It’s really not a big deal. You don’t let the clumps dry.
CO2 probably works pretty good. I probably wouldn’t go through the hassle of shipping though.

Tumble dryer, no heat, 3 tennis balls, easy. Does take a few hours.

All we’ve ever needed to wash a down bag or jacket is a tub or 60 quart cooler. Let it soak in the water and Nik down wash then gently press the water out and rinse five times. Then we lay the bag over a table outside and turn and shake every hour. It takes about 5 hours to dry a WM 20° bag in late spring when the temps are high and the humidity low. The bag always fills the storage sack up fuller after the wash. Jackets take a couple hours to dry. Just make sure to rinse every bit of the down wash out. After the drying process we lay out the bag somewhere inside for a couple days to make sure it is very dry. We do like to roll the bags into the washer and spin dry before laying out over the backyard table. Our bags and jackets last for decades. When we have problems with the zippers WM replaces those for free with no return shipping charges. I felt bad after using the zippers on two jackets in very sandy conditions for seven years but they refused to let me pay for the service no matter how hard I objected.

cleaning down bags and jackets isn’t difficult

I’ve washed down stuff, not a big deal.

I just hand washed it.  Use soap intended for down.  Let it soak a long time, manually agitate, repeat a few times, then several rinses of clean water.

Spinning in the washing machine gets most of the water out.

Drying in the machine takes a while but just be patient.  Drier balls are good.  Take the fairly dry item out and beat on the baffles to get the down evenly distributed and dry some more if it still feels damp.

You could weigh it and keep drying until it quits losing weight.

I have washed down items as recommended above, and the only part that is difficult for me is redistributing the down evenly after drying. Sometimes it gets very clumped up. Supercritical CO2 makes sense hypothetically, but I have no idea how detail oriented those particular people are.

I haven’t had too  many problems washing and drying my sleeping bag and other down items in the past. This summer, it was much harder to get my sleeping bag dry. We are seeing increased humidity, something I’ve not ever really experienced here. We are a normally a very dry place, so a few hours of drying is sufficient. But this year, it took days,  literally, to get my bag completely dry. I would tumble it in the dryer on low with some tennis balls (I reserve a few clean ones the dog doesn’t get to suck on!). Then fluff it up and lay it out for a while, then repeat. For days.

May is the time best here when the heat ramps up to or near triple digits and the humidity is single digits. It is very dry before monsoons. Shaking it vigorously every hour helps even the down and lightly finger batting the corner clumps spreads them. You can tell as it dries from the pathetic nothing after the spin to the super fluffing it does when dry. I still don’t store it for at least a couple days.

I don’t see this being easy in high humidity areas without a machine dryer. My WM Flight jacket dried in 2 hours flat.

If anyone tries this for the first time by hand just press very gently when removing the water between rinses. You press too hard you pop a baffle. Gently and zero problems.

My main problem with conventional washing is I don’t own a dryer. So $50 to save me 6 hours of work seems appealing.

Also I am very easy on my gear and just inherently believe that a minimal agitation in CO2 is less prone to a baffle blowout than a wet bag in the dryer, even if I had one. Plus zero risk/effort to remove clumping or redistribute down.

And from an environmental standpoint SC CO2 is a zero-chemical, zero water, closed loop cleaning system. The primary energy input would be pressurizing the vessel to CO2’s supercritical state.

I have been camping the last couple weeks, but intent to give it a try in the next couple months and will report back. I just bought a decent .01 gram scale and will record before and after weights just to see if a noticeable amount of oil was removed.

Knowing a little about Supercritical CO2, it seems like an ideal cleaning medium to me