Recycled Down from Mattress Topper

[spursfiend]

I'm in the "materials acquisition" phase of making an underquilt. My budget is pretty tight right now so I decided to bust into a mattress topper (bought from sportsmans guide 8-9 yrs ago) that I don't use anymore. The topper has a 4" thick feather-filled bottom part and a 2" thick down-filled top part. I wanted to see how good the down was so I ripped a seam in the top part. It seemed to be fairly feather free, so I decided to try it out on something quick(ish) and (relatively)easy. Last year I found a "too good to be true" $85 price on a 20 deg down mummy bag... well, it was. The down inside was sparse, it wasn't baffled and wouldn't keep ANYONE warm to 40 degrees, much less 20. Anyway, I ripped a small section of the seam for each sewn thru down compartment and added down from the topper using justjeff's vacuum cleaner method. (Thanks Jeff!) Because I don't have a small enough scale, I have no idea how much down I added. I filled the extender tube with down until it wouldn't suck up anymore, then blew it out into the sleeping bag. Smaller compartments got 1 load, bigger ones got 2-2 1/2 loads.

It looks like it'll work just fine, so my next job is to start cutting and sewing my underquilt using recycled down!!

Now a couple of questions for the great minds that are Hammock Forums...
I hope to have something that will get me to around 30 degrees F. Does 2-2.5" baffles with a little overstuff sound about right?
Do I NEED to weigh the down before adding it or can I just fill the compartments till they all have about the same loft? I'm guessing that it isn't all that important since I don't know the fill power of the down and have way more down than I'll need for this project.
Also, just out of curiousity, is there a reason for overstuff with shorter baffles instead of taller baffles without overstuff?

Thanks for all the information I've been gleaning from y'all over the last year or so!

[tammons]

>Now a couple of questions for the great minds that are Hammock Forums...
I hope to have something that will get me to around 30 degrees F. Does 2-2.5" baffles with a little overstuff sound about right?

Ihave a golite ultra 20 with 2.5" and its good to 20dF. A bottom quilt is less efficient, so for 30dF maybe 2.5-2.75" with a slight overfill.

>Do I NEED to weigh the down before adding it or can I just fill the compartments till they all have about the same loft?

You better weigh it if you know the loft.
Else I dont know how you would get the same amount into each baffle.

If you ever want to build something easier, you could do a 5 oz climasheild UQ. I think it cost $15 a yard and has the same warnth to weight ratio of about 550 loft down.

[KerMegan]

Weighing the down in.1 gram increments is essential to maintaining their gram-weenie street cred. As long as each baffle is long/wide enough to cover you, and has enough down to keep it at the desired loft, you are the only one who can say if it is too heavy or not, as you will be the one carrying/sleeping with it.
cubic inch calculations are neede only if you really really need to know if another 3 oz $25 (approx) bag of 900 fill down will be too much or too little...or under or over budget.
HTH (it's just a prototype after all right? ) KM