Waterproof dog beds still keeping water out?

Here at Tuffies we do as much testing as we possibly can to make sure we are selling the highest quality dog beds. We have our fabrics tested for hydrostatic head at an independent laboratory, where we send unused, used and washed fabrics to see the durability to water-resistance in every way.

We also, from time to time, get a bed back from a customer, who has a complaint and we make sure we get to the bottom of the problem and every time it is a misunderstanding, not a fault (except sometimes a manufacturing fault, but never fabric or quality fault). Recently we had a call from a lady, who said she had bought lots of waterproof dog beds from us over the years. She told us that it takes around a year for her dog to dig a hole in them, so she replaces them every year as she said that our dog beds are the strongest there is to stand up to her dog’s sharp and relentless claws. However, she said that the latest one she had bought only lasted four months and was not waterproof anymore. We sent her a new bed and got the “faulty” one back.

The first thing I did when it arrived was of course to open it up in order to see how wet it was inside. It was bone dry. You could see the heavy claw marks across it, but it was still totally waterproof. It would seem that where she lives and where the dog bed sits in her house there is a lot of relative humidity in the air, which will cause the dreaded condensation underneath. It has to be said that with the wet and cold summer, we have had, this problem is probably bigger this year than when we have just moderate and normal summers. Everything is damp even if you don’t feel that it’s clammy. So when you put waterproof dog beds down on a cold tiled floor, they are guaranteed to trap moisture underneath.

If you are not used to deal with these things, you might mistake this from “leaking”. When you lift up the bed, it feels like water has seeped out from the inside, but that is obviously not the case, it is just condensation on the outside. The good thing is, that this is waterproof, and the stuffing will remain nice and dry. If it had been a water-permeable material, all that condensated water would have been absorbed in to the bed, leaving it cold and clammy for the dog.

The problem that can arise when you have the condensation is that mold will follow pretty quickly too. This is unsightly and can cause smell. As we can’t change physics where humidity in air precipitates when it is cooled down (on the tiled floor), we will have to solve this problem in a different way. This is to raise the dog beds off the floor. If you have simply crude pallets, it will work fine, but you may prefer this arrangement to be in the kennel and not in your living room. In the house you could simply put the bed on a little slatted wooden frame to allow airflow. It will look neat like that.

Bottom line is, that you have a dog bed that is DRY INSIDE because the cover is waterproof.