Raingear tries to keep liquid water from being able to move through it one way, while allowing vapor water to move through it the other way. This is tricky so compromises are made. There’s a million posts about different types of WPB raingear and how they work that I won’t bother to rehash, but I’m now interested in one extreme end of the trade-off space: NON breathable waterproof layers, suitable for UL backpacking, at least for pants.
Most threads about this mention a few different products:
None of these products claim to be breathable, which made me naively assume that they must be trading off breathability for much better waterproofness and/or durability. But it doesn’t appear that they are. Lightheart Gear, for instance, only claims a hydrostatic head of “>” 3,000mm. Antigravity gear lists “Hydrostatic Head Rating: >3000mm” as well. Now, hydrostatic head might be a problematic way to rate raingear performace for a lot of reasons but still, 3k mm is well below what WPB jackets claim and is really not into the territory of ‘waterproof’ for raingear I don’t think?
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There’s a comment below this post where a user says AGG disagrees that the products are ‘waterproof’:
“I would have hoped you might have updated this review, since we communicated awhile back about the absolutely wrong information on this jacket (and the matching pants) that you got from their web site (as did we) resulting in our buying the suits and then almost dying of hypothermia from being sopping wet in a deluge on the Cape Wrath Trail this last June (2019) because they are NOT AT ALL waterproof!!! Their web site at the time you wrote the review and at the time we bought the rain gear stated it was silnylon coated in PU with a 30,000 mm hydrostatic head and didn’t need DWR coating. What they sent us was not even waterproof at all, but water resistant and requiring (though they did not do it) DWR to be even slightly water resistant. We were stuck in the middle of far nothwestern Scotland with no rain gear. We ended up buying some horrid plastic stuff from China (in a really sweet and friendly small post office store in Kinlochewe) to get us to Ullapool where we found a decent outdoor store and were able to get something better. In our email communications with Antigravity Gear, trying to sort this out, they refused to acknowledge they had ever claimed their rainsuits were waterproof. They ended up refunding us the cost.
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I don’t really understand why someone would want a slightly water resistant jacket (basically about as good as a tent fly, so, if you touch it, water will go through) that is an absolute sweatbox, but these jackets seem pretty popular so I guess there is one!
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I’m looking for something more like the Columbia PVC rainpants I used to wear on fishing trips as a kid. I don’t know what the hydrostatic head rating was but it was a sheet of PVC, for water to go through the pressure would have to be high enough to rip the material. They were also extremely durable. There are people that sell pants made of non-breathable, durable non-woven materials that look like they have high waterproofness (at the cost of no breathability) like Grundens, but these aren’t designed with lightness or packability in mind.
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Am I misunderstanding these posts about these UL raingear vendors? Is there anyone making very waterproof, non-breathable, durable rainpants that are relatively light?
