Verdict
At £43 when tested, Kampa’s Single Layer Citrine sleeping bag is in our ‘medium price range’, being twice the price of some of the cheap sleeping bags. It’s more attractive than most sleeping bags, with it’s contemporary leaf design.
Buy it if you want a 350gsm weight traditional sleeping bag with good thermal performance. This sleeping bag may suit you if you’re keen on duvets, but need something neater and slightly more compact to pack away each morning when you turn the bed back into twin sofas during your caravan holidays.
Pros
The fabric design is modern yet inoffensive
It lies neat and flat, like a duvet
The 350gsm filling is warm enough to use in a caravan
Cons
It’s bulky to store in a caravan locker
It comes in a large suitcase style case
There’s no hood, baffle or drawstring
Kampa’s Single Layer Citrine sleeping bag is much like its Double Layer Garnet sleeping bag: a very traditional design with very traditional styling. That said, the Citrine pattern is a little more edgy, despite being brown enough to blend in seamlessly with most older vans’ interiors.
This bag is quite a bit thinner than the double-layer Kampa Garnet — the filling drops from 500 to 350 grammes per square metre — but thermally it still performs well.
It’s 94cm (37 inches) wide and 200cm (78 inches) long.
The outer shell and lining of this sleeping bag are both made from material that feels as soft as bed sheets, being made of 65 per cent Polyester and 35 per cent cotton, with the smoothness of a 153 thread count. The filling is ‘Soft Touch Siliconised 4 Hole Hollow Fibre’. This single layer bag has 350gsm of the filling, but you can also buy a double layer version of the Citrine with super-warm 500gsm filling.
If you buy two of these sleeping bags you can easily zip them together to make a giant sleeping bag for two people.
The large suitcase-style case supplied with it means that the bag isn’t a small item to store. The bag weighs 2.75kg. If you buy the double layer version this weight goes up to 3.4kg.
The lack of a hood on the Citrine is an issue now that so many otherwise-traditional sleeping bag designs have them, to enhance the sleeper’s warmth overnight.
For instance, our group sleeping bag test winner, the Outwell Campion, £25, is a supreme example of the new breed of sleeping bags that combine the best of all worlds. It is mainly a rectangular sleeping bag, at the foot end. Yet it has a rounded mummy-style drawstring hood section that you can place on top of your chilly pillow at night. It’s roomy when opened out, but once you’ve put it into its compression bag it becomes far more compact to store than the Kampa Single Layer Citrine. Read the Outwell Campion review to find out its other advantages in this highly competitive market.
The other traditional rectangular envelope shaped sleeping bags we tested were the SunnCamp Deluxe King Size Expression, £40, the Vango Serenity, £41, the Kampa Double Layer Garnet, £35, and the Coleman Vail Comfort sleeping bag, £53 at the time of our test. Check out our reviews to compare the pros and cons of each version of this popular design. For instance, the Coleman Vail Comfort offers phenomenal thermal insulation and the bottom layer extends to cover your pillow, but there’s a catch, as you’ll see from our sleeping bag review.
If you have a small caravan, or if you’re buying sleeping bags for festivals, boating holidays, tent camping, sleepovers or backpacking, then the mummy sleeping bags that pack down small into little compression bags for portability and locker storage might be a wiser choice. We tested plenty of these cosy cocoons to discover the best mummy sleeping bags for sale. As you’ll see from our star ratings, the Robens Trailhead 1500, £50, roomy and pod-like Argos 144/1895 Highlander Sleephuggerz 250gsm Single Cowl Sleeping Bag, £25, Halfords Urban Escape Tahoe, £20, and Easycamp Cosmos, £23 all achieved four-star ratings, though as ever the right sleeping bag for you may depend on your own body shape and height, as you’ll see in each of the reviews. Other mummy sleeping bags tested were the Argos 927/6378 Regatta Single Mummy Sleeping Bag, £20, and the Robens Appalachion 1500, £75, an excellent sleeping bag for extreme conditions, but a bit over the top in terms of the performance needed for normal camping and caravan holidays.
Then we also tested two very unusual sleeping bags. if you don’t mind looking like an astronaut, Arctic explorer, skier, or a giant toddler, we reckon one of these human-shaped padded onesie styles of sleeping bags will give you the last laugh round the barbecue or camp fire, when everyone else starts grabbing an assortment of blankets, hats and gloves! Check out our reviews of the amazing Musucbag Lite sleeping bag, £69, and the Summit Motion Sac sleeping bag, £50.
This bag is quite a bit thinner than the double-layer Garnet