Down quality question

[Ike]

Hi all,
I spent last night harvesting about 3 lb of down, one source was a 30 year old winter sleeping bag and the other was a 30 year old duvet.
I expect both are lower quality but for those who know I am wondering if you can tell from the photo if down is one better than the other?

The sleeping bag down (left) looks like duck -it has a lot of brown and green feathers and the larger down clusters than the duvet.
In the duvet, the ratio of down to feathers is higher (fewer feathers) but both the feathers and down clusters appear smaller.

Like Craige suggested below I could weigh and volume test but I am hoping there is a quick visual indication to compare the two

Thanks and Cheers

[craige]

Weigh the bags, if you get them to roughly the same weight then the puffiest one is the higher quality.

If you want a rough fill power then get a container of some kind weigh out one oz of down and put it in the container, then calculate the volume, then you will have (very roughly) the fill power. Hope this helps.

[Ike]

Thanks Craige, I edited the original post to be a little more clear.

Cheers

[Mouseskowitz]

What Craige said is the only way I know. I think I've read before that feather content does not always correlate with fill power.

[Ike]

What Craige said is the only way I know. I think I've read before that feather content does not always correlate with fill power.

I started to look into it and the topic got more complicated than I wanted to get (feather types, down cluster size, old and young birds, duck and goose etc) so I decided to treat it all as lower 550 - 600 FP down.

UPDATED:
I stuffed and sewed closed one of my two newly arrived 3 season Barnaby TQ shells from Dave at Underquilts.com. (2" duct tape in the photos for reference)
Still have to add cinch cord and make the footbox but it turned out great - Top notch product from Dave!

Stuffing was easy and mess free using the plumbing-T approach, hope to finish it tonight.

Thanks for the responses and Cheers