That is such a huge letdown! I was on the brink of finishing off this video, raving about this
tent and recommending that people buy it, and then I discovered this massive issue.
Welcome to Roughing it with Ruth: the channel where everything is a bit rough around the edges!
There is something so magical about sitting inside of a tent in the rain. It's not great
for the audio, but the ambience is amazing! This tent that I am sitting in at the moment is the
Oztrail Fast Frame six-person tent. I primarily bought this tent because I was going on a camping
trip with my son, on my own, and I didn't want to take one of our hiking tents - I wanted a big tent
that we could stand up in - but I knew that I was going to have to set it up pretty much by myself,
so I was looking for something that would go up pretty quickly and easily.
The Oztrail Fast Frame six-person tent has a hubbed pole, so you just fold the pole out
and extend the legs and snap it into place, put some pegs in, put the fly sheet on, and you're
pretty much done. Good to go! What attracted me to the Oztrail tent in comparison to other
types of these pop-up tents is that the Oztrail comes with a full fly sheet. A lot of these other
cabin-style pop-up tents just have a small little fly sheet right on the top, like a little cap,
and I wanted something with a full fly sheet because I knew that sometimes we were going to be
camping in bad weather and I really did not want to get wet. It has one big door in the front
and three big windows on the other three sides. On the inside of the tent the three windows and
the door have sections of mesh that you can unzip to sort of open the window, and there'll still be
a mesh screen there, but it will let air through and corresponding to those areas on the fly sheet
on the outside of the tent, there is also one big door and three windows. The nice thing about the
big door fly sheet on the front of the tent is that you get two extra solid poles with the tent
and you can prop that fly sheet section up as a sort of awning in the front of the tent,
to make a kind of porch area with shade or some rain protection. Obviously when the awning is up,
if it's pitched pretty high, then there is a bit of a risk of rain being blown in from
the sides. When the awning is pitched out like that it's quite a large flat surface,
and water does tend to want to pool there, so you need to try and kind of slant it a little bit
just so that the water can run off every now and then. The dimensions of this tent are 2.8 meters
by three meters, and that is a six person size according to Oztrail, but six people sleeping kind
of hiking style on little hiking mattresses on the floor quite close together. You will not fit six
stretchers in here - absolutely not. You probably will be able to fit three stretchers in here
and myself and my fiance and my seven-year-old son have all slept in this tent and there's plenty of
space for us and our baggage. We even had a chair set up in the tent when it was raining.
There are two pockets sewn onto the inside of the tent and each of those pockets is divided into two
different sections which are relatively large. You can put things like cell phones, head lamps, that
kind of thing in there. There are also two hooks on the ceiling from which you can hang lanterns
or headlamps if you're wanting a bit of light. The inner tent has a very large expanse of mesh on the
top part of the tent. The fly sheet keeps it dry, but without the fly sheet, water would definitely
come straight through there and that's actually a good thing, because when you have the fly sheet on
and you have the whole tent closed up when it's raining - like I have it now - that mesh
at the top actually allows the inner tent to breathe quite a lot. So far I have not had any
condensation on the inside of this tent whatsoever and I must say when you do have all of the windows
and doors open this is one of the few tents that I can bear to be inside in the afternoons in
South Africa in summer. It is actually really well ventilated, especially if you open up the windows
on the fly sheet. It's got a nice sort of area where breezes can blast through the tent
and that is very very nice for South Africa's climate in particular. This tent is unfortunately
a little bit on the pricey side: I bought it from Camp and Climb in Centurion and it was five
thousand rand. You can probably find it online for slightly cheaper. The packaging of the tent once
it is packed up is very long. It takes up quite a bit of space, but the upside of that is that it
goes up a lot quicker than more compact packing tents. The weight on the packaging of this tent
claims that it is 12 kilograms. When I weighed it with my luggage scale, it weighed 12.9 kilograms,
so I'd say it's slightly heavier than 12 kilograms. On the packaging it also states that
it requires two people to set up this tent and I think the reason why they say that it requires two
people, is that it is a little bit difficult to get the fly sheet on on your own. It is possible
to set it up on your own - I have done it and I will probably continue to do that in future,
but it it can be a little bit of a struggle to get the fly sheet on on your own, particularly if
you're kind of short like I am. When the windows on the fly sheet are zipped closed they have quite
a long area along the bottom of the window, and in the center of that long area there's a little
square of Velcro to help keep it closed and that seems very 'tacked on as an afterthought' to me.
It doesn't look sewn on all that well, although none of them have actually broken loose yet,
and I think that what happened is they made the tent and started testing it and realized
that those window flaps flapped in any sort of wind, so they added those little Velcro
squares to keep the windows shut. I would have far preferred them to make a loop and toggle system,
like the inside windows have at the top of the window, to help close the window
instead of those little bits of Velcro. If you happen to be staying at a campsite
that has power and you want that power in your tent, there is also a little zip in the one corner
where you can put an extension cord through into the tent. Oh my gosh, it's really raining now!
So just as I was wrapping up this video, I noticed that this one pole on the fly sheet - there's one
thin pole on the fly sheet that is a flexible fiberglass pole that you put into the sleeve on
the inside of the fly sheet and then it hooks into little grommets on the tent inner - and
that section is leaking. You can see here on the outside of the tent inner, there's a couple of
droplets of water and I was trying to figure out where that comes from. Somewhere on the sleeve,
there is a leak. Here on this side, same thing: a couple of droplets of water on the tent inner.
This is why I make these videos: so that other people don't waste their money on products that
don't work. For the amount of money that I paid for this tent, I am pretty livid that
it's leaking. So the rain has finally stopped. It's been raining off and on the entire weekend,
so I've had quite a good opportunity to test out the leak that I found on this tent. The sleeve on
the front of the fly sheet for that one flexible fiberglass pole has seam tape on the inside of
the fly sheet, but obviously on the outside of the fly sheet there is no kind of sealant at all and
what's happening is that some water is getting in to those sewing holes. That sleeve is acting like
a little waterproof pocket that collects water and then eventually, when enough water is collected in
there, it spills out of the sleeve on either side. It's just a really bad design. I cannot understand
why that was allowed to be sold with a tent that I expected to be a little bit higher quality than
this. I do think that I probably will be able to fix it. I've purchased some Gear Aid seam
sealant - some liquid seam sealant - and as soon as the tent has dried out properly I'll apply that
to the outside of the fly sheet in that stitching area. I don't think that that should be happening
with an Oztrail tent. I expected more from this company. If you do purchase this tent, just
maybe go ahead and apply your own seam sealant to that outside area of stitching, because otherwise
you will get water coming into that tent sleeve. Thank you so much for watching this video and for
putting up with the slightly choppy audio from the rain! If you'd like to see more videos from me,
then you can click on my channel name to see videos that I've made in the past,
or you can subscribe to my channel to see videos that I'm going to make in the future.