The nature of infiltration into water repellent soils is highly nonlinear and dynamic. These systems pose substantial challenges to meaningful measures and expressions of hydraulic properties over space and time. Large gaps remain in our fundamental understanding of dynamically repellent soil hydraulic properties Tension infiltrometers maintain a constant negative water pressure at the surface. This method has proven to be sensitive to dynamic changes in wettability and associated effects on infiltration. We conducted field and laboratory studies using tension disc infiltrometers along with water and ethanol solutions to investigate dynamic repellency in post-wildfire soils from Northern Ontario, Canada. The advantages of the wettability of soils to ethanol versus the coincident shift in effective pore water pressures through variable interfacial tensions and the differences in fluid mobility due to variable viscosity and density are presented. We compare and contrast the observed behaviours of infiltration under tension into dynamically hydrophobic soils with hydrophilic soils. The data and system are conceptualised and explained through contact angle dynamics and variable fractional wettability of the soil. The limitations of extending hydrophilic concepts and hydraulic functions to hydrophobic soils are discussed along with persistent challenges to advance our ability to simulate and predict system behaviours in naturally occurring water repellent soils.