All the Joys of Tyvek

There are tons of resources out there about how ultralight backpackers have used Tyvek. It's actually a super awesome product, and many people have found ways to utilize it. It's light weight, it's cheap, it provides a decent vapor barrier, and it allows vaporized moisture out, but not in. Super important features when you are making your own gear. At the same time, they really don't give a ton of information about the small details that you have to learn by experience. And there are quite a few.



Most everyone suggests washing Tyvek to make it quieter. It's super loud without this softening. I get it. It doesn't have to be quiet in the process of attaching it to the building, and once it is there, it's not moving. Who cares about sound, right? When ultralighters absconded with the material for use in gear, the noise became a problem. This stuff could double as thunder sound effects. You move it even a little bit and it is loud. Lucky was pretty scared when I was working on it, that's for sure. So, you wash it.

This is not all of it, I promise.

Key to washing that you can find online are:

• Don't use detergent
• Don't put it in the dryer (though this is contested. I didn't. I didn't want to have to reorder anything)
• It might be worth washing it before you make a big bag, just because it means that has to drain out somehow
• You can wash it once or more than once, just depends on how quiet you want it. I washed each piece two to three times

And then there are the keys you learn as you are trying to wash 20 feet of Tyvek.

• Cut it into smaller pieces. 20 feet does not fit in your regular washing machine easily
• Once you have cut it into smaller pieces, wash individually. Unlike wool, which you want to wash with a lot of stuff to soften it, Tyvek needs a lot of room to get a nice soft feeling.
• Overloading your washing machine will equal tears in your Tyvek. This is counter productive to all of those wonderful features listed above. 

This is what my living room looked like while I was attempting to cut it up. 

Once you have washed your Tyvek, you have to remember that you aren't actually forcing water to permeate the material. It's designed to resist water. That means when you pull it out of the washing machine, any water that wasn't spun out is still going to be there, sitting on the material. This leads to lots of water spilling everywhere, especially if you just pull it out quickly.

You also need somewhere to dry it. There is another long discussion online that you can find that comes right after the washing machine discussion that covers how to dry this piece of wet material. I found the best place for me was our spare bathroom's shower curtain bar. It was great. I just made sure that the front side or outside reached down into the tub and let it hang dry.

I was able to push it aside and hang all three of the pieces from here. I didn't try to make sure they were all smooth, just that they were dry before I took them off the bar. I let them hang for a couple of days, which seemed to work. The picture above doesn't show the holes that I found from the first round of washing where I tried to fit all 200 square feet of material in the washing machine. Just don't.