cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/45283933
If you ride in during the summer (who doesn’t???), there may be times when you’re putting bug repellent spray on.
DEET-based products harm synthetic fabric, so opt for a DEET-free bug spray if you don’t want any surprises.
I’ve used picaridin-based products, and they seem to work as good, if not better, than DEET.
Like I said in the OP:
Use DEET or picaridin on skin.
Use Permethrin on your gear (just keep the liquid you use to treat your gear away from cats).
DEET will melt a lot of other synthetic stuff too like tents, tarps, straps, etc.
Picaridin is very effective and doesn’t do this.
An Australian army study found it about as effictive as deet.
I need to pick some of that stuff up for the summer…
Reminds me of the time I travelled through Asia backpacking and was in need of a bug spray. Found something that said some high amount of DEET was in it, don’t remember exactly. I’d say it said 80% but that’s probably not possible, not sure.
Anyway, after using it a bit the drips from the spray slowly melted the sticker on the bottle. Somehow the plastic bottle itself was OK. But it got me a bit worried what I was spraying on my skin…
You can actually get up to (basically) 100% deet.
Oi, then maybe it was even 100%. I actually wrote that first then thought, nah, someone is going to reply that 100% is not possible, so corrected it to 80%.
80% is totally possible, it can go up to 100% for deep woods protection.
As I recall, it doesn’t melt every single type of plastic, just some to most of them as well as probably things like dyes, adhesives, etc.
That sounds like an absolute win, synthetic fabric sucks.
