Air Cooling: the well ventilated backpack

Backpacks on hikes: sometimes we love them, sometimes we hate them. They mean we can transport everything we need for our adventure over a full day (as well as our well-deserved snacks!) But our backpacks can sometimes weigh us down, or cause us to sweat during our hike, which is uncomfortable. Luckily, various systems are available to ensure your hiking backpack is relatively breathable and remains comfortable during your hike. Having a system that allows the back of the bag to be breathable is therefore an important criteria when choosing your hiking backpack. But how does it work? Let’s first take a tour of the various solutions available.

What’s more, at Quechua and Decathlon in general, we have engineers dedicated to product testing, who specialise in it. We also have laboratories to test our backpacks under varied conditions. In a nutshell, we have all the knowledge and equipment we need to offer you high-performance products at the best price.

Everything takes place at the laboratory in Lille. So all Quechua bags that want to be Air Cooling-certified are tested on this dummy in this lab. The results of these tests indicate whether a bag has passed or failed the airflow test, measured in W/m2, depending on the agreed threshold value. If it passes, we can give it “Air Cooling” certification.

Sometimes we’re taken by surprise. A hiking backpack with mesh can actually have less airflow than one with “four squares” (the famous foam squares we were talking about at the beginning of this article), whereas hikers perceive it as being more breathable. Which is why it’s important to put aside hikers’ impressions during these tests, even though they’re still important. Ideally, this will then lead to field tests which validate, "in real life", the Decathlon products that you find in the shops.

After the laboratory tests, our backpacks then set off on hiking trails, to undergo a more "practical test". In fact, all the testers are then going to evaluate not only breathability, but also all the other aspects during the hike, in real life conditions: are the pockets reachable? Is the backpack comfortable, even when heavily loaded? Etc. But in this article, we’re focusing on the laboratory tests, as these are the ones that give us objective and comparable data concerning breathability between all of the backpacks tested.

To sum up, testing a hiking backpack in the laboratory isn’t a matter of improvisation. Of course, both types of tests (in the laboratory and field tests during actual hikes) provide us with different information to help us to design the best hiking backpack, that’s as comfortable and breathable as possible.

Keeping your back dry while exerting yourself physically is the aim of this latest stretched mesh version, which has been reworked to provide you with ideal ventilation, without weighing down the backpack. In fact, the metal frame, called the armature, has been made as light as possible, without compromising on its solidity. The structure therefore maintains a distance between your body (and your clothing) and the backpack. The mesh material has been reworked to be even softer and more comfortable.

You could ask yourself how a metal frame could ever be comfortable... Beyond the softness of the mesh that covers the frame, it’s the backpack’s size that plays the comfort card. To accommodate different body types, both for women and men, we offer some of our hiking backpacks in different sizes. For example, in our hiking backpack MH500 (a 40 L backpack model), you can choose size S or L.

What’s more, the frame is present on backpacks designed for hiking over a day at most. In fact, for treks or hikes taking place over several days, you’ll need a bigger backpack, for which this solution isn’t ideal. And for long periods of travel, you’ll need a backpack with a 50-litre capacity at least, maybe more. There are other methods of regulating perspiration on the back for these backpacks.