In order to identify general quality, down is testing through a number of different parameters – Content, Cleanliness and Fill Power.

Down testing has been done in the same way for the past fifty plus years and much of the testing to this day is done manually and by eye and subjective interpretation. That is why it is important to always test with labs that have a long history of down testing. A tester that isn’t intimately familiar with the material might mis-classify a cluster as a feather and that can have a dramatic impact on how it needs to be labeled.

ALLIED Feather + Down has accredited down and feather testing laboratories in our facilities in Los Angeles and Hangzhou, China. The technicians are amongst the most experienced in the world with at least 20 years of down and feather testing with our primary technicians in California.

Having accredited testing labs at our main facilities helps maintain the quality and cleanliness our partners have come to expect. Every raw material lot is tested for quality, content and banned substances that can occasionally be found in material collected from some regions (most often the result of a contaminated water supply). And at shipping, every production lot is further tested to ensure the highest quality material is being shipped for our partner brands.

Our internal labs all provide the following down and feather tests.

• Fill power
• Content analysis
• Turbidity
• Oxygen
• Fat and Oil
• Water Resistance
• PFAS

The cluster ratio you normally see is a percentage of down cluster to everything else. Normally, for ease of communication, this “other” is represented as feather. But in reality, a 90 / 10 down, for example, will actually have very little “feather” in it. Using a Montane lot and looking at the TrackMyDown.com report for lot number 13150315388, you can see in this 90 / 10 lot, we see 95.6% down cluster, 2.0% down fiber, 0.8% feather fiber, 1.5% waterfowl, 0.0% landfowl, 0.0% quill and 0.0% residue.

To explain the different elements, the content analysis is broken down as follows:

While it has been regularly verified that down has the highest warmth to weight potential of any insulation, it is also difficult to identify exact warmth metrics for any particular specification or fill power. What makes down such an incredibly wide ranging insulation also makes it very difficult to establish a static warmth number since it can be used in so many different ways; creating either a lightweight layering piece or heavy 8000 m parka with the exact same material. Many brands and customers want to see comparisons, but it is important to understand how warmth is usually measured and why this can be misleading.

The normal method for testing warmth is CLO (TOG being another). The CLO measuring system was developed to simplify thermal resistance and measure entire clothing systems.

Generally, panels or blankets are built and laid upon a plate that measures the stability when air is blown over top. The testing machinery measures the thermal resistance of the material on top and formulas are used to determine final CLO number.

THE PROBLEM WITH CLO

One of the biggest problems with CLO measurements in general is the formulas used to determine the CLO from the thermal resistance. While comparative testing can be down within singular labs, It can be grossly misleading to simply compare CLO values with no understanding how they were measured.

Additionally, the entire construction of the blanket used has a measurable effect. Fill weights, stitching lines and fabrics themselves all contribute. So unless everything is the same, to look at a simple CLO value from different sources to compare materials, will likely never be accurate.

And with down, even simply isolating the material, the fill weight has a tremendous effect in the resulting CLO. There is no industry standard for testing insulations for warmth so depending on how much down is being tested, the result will vary. This is why ALLIED will never claim a CLO value for any individual quality and why we think marketing communications like “as warm as down” are grossly misleading.

If brands want to understand and quantify warmth for their garments or sleeping bags, it is necessary to test the final products or within comparative testing for equally built prototype panels.

This is also why it is always impossible to answer the seemingly simple question, “Will 800 fill power be warm enough for …” without a knowledge of the entire holistic product.