I have a Mountain Equipment Superflux jacket, which is a fantastic jacket...for a bit. I'm on my third replacement now since 2020! After a few months, the synthetic "featherless" filling around the elbow articulation points starts to shift significantly, and you end up with a few totally empty baffles at the front of the elbow, and rammed full baffles at the back, leaving cold spots.
ME suggests washing and drying the jacket like a down jacket (delicate wash 30 deg, slow spin, lots of rinses, low temp drying with tennis balls etc), but ultimately, the tennis balls thing just doesn't seem to work to un-clump the filling in the way that it does with down, and the jacket becomes next to useless. I've also tried manually redistributing the filling by teasing it apart, and that doesn't really seem to do anything, and I sent one of them off to Scottish Mountain Gear to be cleaned and sorted, and it came back in the same condition.
Has anybody else had this kind of issue, either with the Superflux or with similar featherless synthetic type jackets? Any prevention techniques, fixes or other advice? As I say, apart from this significant issue, the jacket is basically ideal. Equally, I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong, because I've never seen or heard of anyone else complaining about this problem with this type of jacket!
