The hubs break and the legpoles bend beyond repair. Got one of these out of a storage unit at auction. We set up the REI Screen House Shelter and L.L.Bean’s Woodlands Screen House side by side in the Mojave Desert in 100-degree temps. Fellow campers consistently gravitated toward the REI shelter over the L.L.Bean. Please get in touch with us before opening any return requests. We offer a 30-day returns policy – if you are not happy with your purchase you may return the item in its original condition for an exchange or full refund.
As I said at the start, this is the worst screen house I’ve ever owned. This still has a lot of life left in it and I would love to be able to fix it. I have been trying to replace it ever since I lost it in a wind storm. I put it up in my yard for my now wife’s bridal shower. It looked wonderful in the yard so I decided to leave it for a while.
Then the instructions start to get really funny. ‘Insert the leg poles into the hubs to raise the screenhouse frame’ got the first laugh. The “frame” barely stayed together on the ground. Any attempt to lift a corner and insert a leg pole resulted in pipes flying everywhere.
Two shorter aluminum poles cross to support the roof while four longer poles join to the roof poles at the top of the tent and slide into pegs at the ground. The tent roof is made of polyester taffeta treated with a DWR (durable water repellent) coating. The walls are made of fine no-see-um nylon mesh edged with polyester taffeta.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere in the blog, I’m getting married in Joshua Tree on August 2nd, outdoors. It occurred to me that if I insist on inviting people into a blazing Mojave inferno in the height of the summer it would be polite to provide some shade. Shade can be a matter of survival there if you’re outside at midday. Then I started having other wild fantasies, like effectively adding a room to the desert shack where I live by erecting the shadehouse in the backyard. The set-up is extremely complicated and took two persons over an hour to complete, including all staking of the structure and guy lines as required by the instructions. We placed the screen house over a picnic table at the campsite and it did a fairly good job of keeping insects out while we were eating.
We tested the Coleman 10 × 10 Instant Screened Canopy and Walmart’s Ozark Trail 10′ × 10′ Instant Screen House during our first round of testing in the winter and spring of 2016. These two shelters are the same size and shape (7-foot peak height, 17 pounds) with an almost identical design. The cap-like ozark trail chairs roofs on both models provided far less shade than we wanted, especially in the beating desert sun. The mesh walls do have a ribbon of polyester at the foot, but even carefully staked they can leave gaps at the ground; if bug protection is your main concern, these tents would likely fall short.
Unfortunately, we cannot refund return postage costs on items that are not faulty. If the item has been attempted to assemble or arrived in not same conditions as it was delivered, we reserve the right not to fully refund the item, with a maximum deduction of 50% that might apply. The item may be missing the original packaging or protective wrapping, or might be in the original packaging ozark trail chairs but not sealed. Our mission is simple – to make unique household products available to our customers at the best possible prices. We take pride in having the opportunity to positively affect a person’s life, so we scour the market looking for the latest and greatest innovations in home and households. We also value our supplier relationships as much as our customer relationships.
We follow the blog and are able to stay in budget and get twice as many items for the family. Walmart offers FREE shipping on purchases over $35. Log In to be able to add this product to your Wish List. Browse Ozark Trail’s top-rated hiking and camping gear and more.
This probably could have been prevented by adding more yellow support poles to the roof. The REI Co-op Screen House Shelter is an intuitively designed, easy-to-erect picnic tent that offers protection from sun, bugs, and mild rain showers. Though the boxy design is basic, in our tests we found that this camping shelter offered the best combination of functionality, durability, and affordability of all the tents we tried. This is one of those products where the instructions are basically a complete fantasy. They make one false unstated assumption after another. What you wind up with is a web of pipes and plastic pieces that falls apart at one end as you assemble the other.
Any $75 canopy tent from a big-box store—we’re talking about the common square canopy with four spindly metal legs—can provide shade during midday. But when you’re camping or eating outdoors, you’ll likely want protection from insects, as well. That’s why we focused on collapsible camping shelters with mesh walls to keep bugs at bay.