I almost doubled the weight of my newest hammock.....Dang.

I picked up a Walhalla netless monolite hammock at Fall Sprawl this year. Living in Florida a bug net is a must for most of the year so I picked up some bug net material from RSBTR and made a Fronkey style bug net for it. The hammock itself with stuff sack, endless loops and whoopies weighed in at 292g and the new bug net just added an additional 205g to it. I may have to get a wheelbarrow to haul this thing around. :lol:

I was talking to Jason from Walhalla about using it as a summer hammock but he tells me that, because of it's lightweight nature it actually makes a great winter shelter because the under quilt has less material to warm up. Makes sense. I plan to put it to the test the day after Christmas on a weeklong camping trip where the temps are forecast to be in the 20's.

Material does not warm up and neither do you. What insulation really does is slow down the rate of heat loss from your body. Once you've reached the point where you are producing heat faster than you are losing it, due to the insulation you feel warmer. With the correct set of insulation for the temp conditions, it will provide the "electric blanket" effect.

Insulation does not provide or generate heat. Thicker hammock material doesn't heat up or transfer heat from an UQ any better, but it might help retain your body heat marginally better than UL stuff. I don't think it's a big enough factor to make book on.

Lets face it, if you are depending on thickness of fabric to provide you a needed boost to your selected insulation kit that is a thin margin indeed. Not disputing Jason, he builds them I don't, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around that one.

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Originally Posted by Randonneur

I was talking to Jason from Walhalla about using it as a summer hammock but he tells me that, because of it's lightweight nature it actually makes a great winter shelter because the under quilt has less material to warm up. Makes sense.

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Doesn't make much sense to me!

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Originally Posted by SilvrSurfr

Doesn't make much sense to me!

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Re-reading it and yeah, that's not how I meant to state that. If your escaping body heat has less to warm before it gets to the insulation to be trapped there it seems like it would make the insulation more efficient in retaining the lost body heat.

When evaluating heat loss we always have to remember that WE are the heat source. Heating up Monolite compared to Hexon 1.6 would probably yield a difference of about 2 calories, and not the kCal (1000) food kind. Literally the 1g of water by 1°C definition.

IMO the biggest downside for Monolite in winter is its permeability. I have no idea about the CFM numbers for Monolite vs other fabrics, but a tremendous amount of heat is lost through convection currents, which explains why people use underquilt protectors, top covers, winter socks and the like. So I wouldn't say it's great for winter, at least not here in the NE or anywhere else with 'real' cold.

Another consideration is durability. I've personally witnessed a Monolite failure and there have been documented issues with Cloud .71 involving catastrophic failure... when these things rip there's nothing halfway about it — they split wide open and dump you.