How to Look After Your Recovery Boots (And What the Warranty Covers)

Almost nobody writes about this, which is strange, because looking after the gear is the main reason one pair of recovery boots lasts five years and an identical pair dies in eight months. It is rarely the motor. It is almost never the battery. It is usually a small hole in a sleeve, put there by a fingernail or a ring, three months after the box was opened.

Compression boots are simple machines: a pump, some tubing, and a set of sealed air chambers per leg. Look after the fabric and the fittings and a set runs for years. Here is the whole maintenance job, which takes about five minutes a week.

Nails and jewellery first, because this is the one that kills boots

Each air chamber is a welded bladder. It holds pressure because it is sealed. Put a hole anywhere in it and that chamber stops inflating, and there is no patch that reliably fixes a welded seam from the inside.

The usual suspects, roughly in the order they turn up in our inbox:

• Long or sharp fingernails, while you are pulling a sleeve into position or working a zip.
• Rings, especially anything with a raised stone or a claw setting.
• Watches and bracelets, which catch on the lining as your arm goes down inside the boot.
• Toenails. Yes, really. Sliding a foot into a snug sleeve is exactly the movement that drags a nail down the inner fabric.
• Belt buckles and clothing zips pressing against the outside while you sit.

The habit is about ten seconds long. Rings and watch off, nails checked, then get in. Do that every session and you have already dealt with the most common failure in this entire product category.

Cleaning the sleeves without wrecking them

The inside of a sleeve gets sweaty. That is normal, and it is why they need a wipe rather than a wash.

Wipe the inside with a cloth wrung out in warm water. A little mild soap is fine after a hot session. Wipe again with plain water to lift the soap, then leave the sleeves open to air. That is the entire procedure.

What not to do, and each of these is a warranty claim we end up having to decline:

• No washing machine. There is a bladder and a welded seam inside every chamber, and a drum is a spin cycle full of hard edges. This is the fastest way to destroy a set.
• No bleach, and no strong solvents. They attack the coating on the inner fabric. The damage does not show up on the day, it shows up weeks later as a chamber that inflates slowly and sags.
• No tumble dryer, no hair dryer, no radiator, no sunny windowsill. Heat and welded seams are not friends.
• No soaking. Water that gets into an air line has to come out somewhere, and it usually chooses the pump.

Dry them flat, in the shade, with the zips open.

Flat matters, because a sleeve hung over a rail dries with a fold set into it. Shade matters more than people think in this country: an afternoon on a Brisbane balcony will stiffen and fade the outer fabric faster than a year of ordinary use.

If you have the Core Pro, two extra notes. Let the heated sleeves cool completely before you wipe them or roll them away, and clean the touchscreen with a dry cloth only. Never spray anything directly onto a control panel.

Storing them: the fold is the enemy

Roll the sleeves rather than folding them wherever you can. If you do fold, do not fold along the same line every time.

A crease that lands in exactly the same spot on every pack-down works the coating like a paperclip you keep bending back and forth. It survives it for a long time, and then one day it does not. Rotating where the fold sits costs you nothing and removes the problem entirely.

Store them somewhere with a stable temperature. A wardrobe, under a bed, or the box they arrived in, all fine. A garage roof cavity, a metal shed, or a car, all bad.

Hoses and connectors

Do not stack heavy things on the hoses, do not run a desk chair over them, and never pull the boots towards you by the tubing. A hose crushed flat develops a memory, and a kinked line means one chamber is always the last to fill.

Disconnect at the connector, holding the fitting rather than the hose behind it. Grit in a fitting is the reason for most "it hisses now" emails, so a dry wipe now and then is worth it.

Zips

Zips fail for two reasons: grit and force. Brush sand out of the teeth after a beach or trail session, close them slowly, and if one snags, back it off rather than yanking. A zip forced past a fold in the fabric never runs smoothly again. Store the sleeves with the zips fully open, which keeps the fabric relaxed and stops the teeth taking a set.

The car is where recovery boots go to die

Worth its own heading, because it is so easy to do and so bad for the gear. A car parked in the sun on a hot Australian afternoon becomes an oven, and the boot is worse than the cabin. Fabric, adhesive, plastic housings and lithium cells all dislike being cooked, and they all age faster afterwards even when nothing visibly changed.

So bring them inside. After the away game, after the trail head, after the Sunday ride, the boots come out of the car at the same time you do.

The battery ages whether you use it or not

The Core 6 Wireless runs a 3,200 mAh cell that gives 3-4 hours of use and takes 2-3 hours to recharge. Lithium cells lose capacity over time on their own, and the two things that speed that up are heat and being left completely flat for months.

Practically, that means: do not put them away empty at the end of a training block. Charge to somewhere around half, store them out of the heat, and give them a top-up every couple of months. If you want the longer version, including why a high pressure setting drains a charge faster than a low one, we covered it in recovery boot battery life explained.

A routine you will actually keep

Maintenance schedules only work if they are short enough to be boring. This one is.

• Every session: rings and watch off before you get in. Zips open, sleeves left to air afterwards.
• Every week or so: wipe the inside with a damp cloth, dry flat in the shade.
• Every month: check the hoses for kinks, wipe the connectors, look along the seams of each chamber for anything that has started to lift.
• Every few months, if they are in storage: charge the battery back up to about half.

That is genuinely it. There is nothing to lubricate, nothing to service, no filter to change.

What the warranty covers

Our 1-year warranty covers the controller, the sleeves, the hoses and the charger against manufacturing faults. In plain terms, that is anything that goes wrong because of how the product was made rather than how it was used.

That includes a pump that stops running or gets noticeably louder, a control unit that will not power on or hold a setting, a chamber that never inflated properly out of the box, a seam that comes apart on its own, a charger that dies, and a battery that fails well beyond normal ageing.

If something on that list happens, email support@ondaboots.com with your order number and a short video of the fault. One short video of the boots running is worth ten emails describing the noise. We identify the failed part from that, and ship you a replacement free of charge. Nothing has to go back overseas, and your consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law sit underneath all of this and cannot be excluded.

And what it does not cover

This is the honest bit, and a puncture is the textbook case.

A hole in a sleeve is accidental damage, not a manufacturing fault. It is the single most common thing people ask us to cover, and it is the single thing we cannot. The same goes for zips that have been forced, hoses cut or crushed, water damage from washing or soaking, heat damage from a dryer or a hot car, bleach or solvent damage to the fabric, and general wear like fading and scuffing.

Normal battery ageing is also outside it. A cell that holds a bit less charge after a long run of charge cycles than it did when new is a lithium battery behaving like a lithium battery.

None of that is us being difficult. It is the line every manufacturer draws, and we are spelling it out because almost all of it is avoidable with the ten-second habit at the top of this article. The FAQ covers the rest, including how 30-day returns work, which is a separate thing from the warranty.

Five minutes, three years

The gap between gear that lasts and gear that does not is almost never the gear. Two pairs come off the same production line. One lives in a wardrobe and gets wiped down, the other lives in a car boot and goes through the wash once. Only one is still working in year three.

Take your rings off. Wipe them down. Dry them flat in the shade. Do not fold on the same crease. Keep them out of hot cars. That is the whole article, and it is the difference between a pair of Core 6 boots costing you A$449 once and costing you A$449 twice.