By <span class=”s1″>Mike Harostock, Andy Rampp, Adam Scott and Rob Shaul @ Mountain Tactical Institute</span>
“You begin a brisk uphill hike, in 35-degree weather and steady rain. You are wearing a “waterproof, breathable” jacket and carrying a 45# ruck or pack. You begin to heat up, but must continue to wear the jacket or risk getting soaked through by the rain. If your jacket is 100% breathable, your base layers can vent and remove the sweat, if not, your base layers get soaked. After 60 minutes the temperature has dropped to 25 degrees, and for safety reasons, you have to stop moving. If your base layer is soaked with sweat, you begin to freeze.”
This scenario describes the mission-direct utility of a waterproof, breathable jacket.
Different fabric manufactures deploy different fabric technologies to achieve fabric breathability. Two were were interested in testing for this study was coating, and a membrane. Gore company first developed breathable fabrics, with is now ubiquitous “Gore-Tex.”
Gore, and others, have demonstrated the breathability of these products in laboratory settings and infomercials such as this. However, we could not find a functional, mission-direct study or test of breathability. Which led us to this study.
Five Jackets were tested:
Jacket Cost Fabric
Colman Rain Jacket $15 PVC (We wanted to compare to a non-breathable jacket)
Marmot PreCip $100 NanoPro Coating (Marmot’s proprietary coating)
Marmot Minimalist $200 Gore Paclite
Marmot Nano $300 Gore Active Shell
Marmot Alpinist $600 Gore Pro-Shell
With the exception of the Colman rain jacket which we purchased at a local sporting goods store, we chose Marmot brand for the other jackets assuming sizing and fit would be consistent. All jackets were size large.
Our study results were pretty decisive. We found that a breathable jacket<span class=”s1″> can help decrease sweat retention by as much as 500% when compared to non-breathable jackets. We also found that breathability alone accounted for less than 9% of jacket price differences. In-fact we found the cheapest breathable jacket, the Marmot Precip ($100), was actually more breathable than all three of the Gore-Tex models ($200, $290 and $600).</span>
Full report can be found here: https://strongswiftdurable-gliffendesignsll.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Jacket-Breathability.pdf
