After my jacket had taken a winter of abuse, I found that it was
no longer waterproof, perhaps not even worthy of the term "water
resistant". Water stopped beading on it and started soaking through.
Needless to say, this was frustrating -- what's the point in wearing
something that keeps the sweat in, then lets water in from outside
as well ?
After looking into it, I first washed the garment. This is supposed to
help. It helped a little, but the jacket still wasn't waterproof.
This indicated that the durable water repellant treatment ("DWR"😉 was
worn down. So the next step was to re-apply the DWR. There are two
ways to do this -- either get a spray-on version or a wash-in. I went
for the spray-on.
The first time I tried it, I wasn't entirely succesful. Going out in
the rain with my newly treated jacket, it still did not keep water out.
I suppose I should have predicted this -- running tap water over the
sleeves, it didn't bead and run off as it did when new. The sleeves
are the hardest part of the garment to fully cover, one must attend
carefully to making sure the sleeves are covered from end to end, all
the way around. Sleeves take a lot of rain when you're out there.
The problem is that I'd missed a few spots with the spray, and perhaps
not put on enough in other places. So I re-applied the spray, taking
care to exhaustively apply a good spray to every square inch of the
garment. It seems that water beads very nicely on the sleeves now, so
I think I was succesful this time around.
Knowing what I know now, I would probably elect for the wash-in route
instead. This takes the guesswork out of getting full coverage, since
you're literally immersing the garment in the treatment.
Cheers,
--
Donovan Rebbechi
http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~elflord/