However, the air mattress doesn’t fare as well in the away leg, when the bout moves to the backcountry. With models that resemble your bedroom’s king-sized mattress and even pump themselves up (with the help of a few batteries), what’s not to love? When these two stalwarts of the sleep system take to the field on a campsite, there’s a clear winner: the air mattress. This is a fixture where the champion emerges depending on the venue of the bout. Sleeping pad vs air mattress: the verdict Sleeping pad vs air mattress Header Cell - Column 0 You simply would not take a large air mattress into the wilderness, as there’d barely be any room for your other hiking essentials in your backpack. A sleeping pad’s lightweight qualities and the fact that many pack down into a compact stuff sack mean that they are always going to win in the portability stakes. ![]() Sleeping pad vs air mattress: portability ![]() The insulation they provide is also conducive to a cozy, warm night’s sleep. This luxurious volume, along with velvety covers and enough space to roll around on, makes air mattresses the obvious choice for comfort. Few things in life are as irritating as waking up on a sagging bed. An air mattress will lovingly cradle you high above the groundsheet and thanks to modern valve locking technology, they don’t lose air during the night like they used to. However, sleeping pads can’t rival an air mattress in terms of sheer volume. For example, you can add a closed-cell foam mat underneath an insulated air mat with an R-value of less than 5 to ensure a warm night when sleeping on frozen ground or snow.Ī sleeping pad is portable enough to whip out of the tent, to lie back on during a lakeside singalong, for example (Image credit: Amazon) Systems can be combined to provide even greater insulation. R-values in excess of 2.5 are fine for 3-season use, while you’ll be wanting something around 5 or greater for extreme winter conditions. R-values range from 0-7: the higher the numbers, the greater the thermal resistance. The value indicates how much resistance the pad or mat provides against conductive heat loss to the ground. How well a pad will insulate you from the cold is indicated by its R-value, which stands for (thermal) “resistance”. Self-inflating and well insulated pads offer enhanced comfort and warmth. Sleeping pads have come a long way from the closed-cell foam mats that used to be commonplace. Maybe get the kids to do it… Sleeping pad vs air mattress: comfort and warmth Think: a couple of minutes of doing snow angels until your weight has pushed all the air out. Deflating them is great fun too, if a little time consuming. The best thing is, many work on batteries as well as household electricity, meaning it's perfectly feasible to bring the kind of double mattress luxury we associate with home for the family tent on car camping trips. These days, they invariably feature a powered pump and almost magically self-inflate. With bigger air mattresses, gone are the days where you’d hammer a foot pump over and over for ten minutes, sounding as though you were repeatedly pummelling a one of the Chipmunks into ground. Some standard air mattresses come with a hand or foot pump and take a bit of graft to inflate. Insulated air mats require a bit of puff to inflate (Image credit: Getty)
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