Let down by poor instructions and manufacturing errors
My purchase of a Berghaus (a UK company) Adhara 500 Nightfall tent has exposed the perils of outsourcing its manufacture to China, when concomitant with a lack of QC oversight. The tent and its accessories are supplied in a single carriage bag, but without any contents list, so there is no way of knowing whether or not one has received a full inventory. The instructions for putting up the tent should be directed at the first-time user, for whom they are, at present, hopelessly inadequate (as noted online by a number of others). Whilst it is commendable that the instructions are printed on waterproof material and sewn into the inside of the carriage bag, the fact that they are, in my case with respect to the poles, completely wrong, led to me seeking assistance from the vendor (Blacks – whose customer services were merely dismissive) during my trial attempt at assembly. My tent was supplied with three (folded) poles, one of which is shorter than the other two and is marked with a section coloured yellow. Both longer poles are unmarked. Of the sleeves on the tent through which the poles are to be threaded, one has a yellow flash at its top, one has an orange flash at both ends and the centre sleeve is unmarked. Following the instructions’: “Insert each pole through its corresponding colour coded sleeve”, I naturally first inserted the yellow-coded pole into the yellow-coded sleeve, which seemed fine, but then I was unable to accommodate one of the longer, unmarked poles into the orange-coded sleeve. This is when I sought advice from Blacks and from watching YouTube videos, but neither was forthcoming. It then dawned on me that the manufacturer must have mis-matched the colour-coding between the poles and the sleeves, such that I was never going to achieve correct assembly if I followed the instructions. I now know that I first have to identify the shorter pole and insert that into the sleeve AT THE SLEEPING END of the tent. In order to provide resistance to ultra-violet degradation, the guy lines should be made from polyamide or polyester. In fact they are made from a very cheap form of polypropylene that, additionally being yellow in colour, will crumble away under prolonged exposure to strong sunlight. I further noted that several guys had been tied to their fastening points with a single half hitch, rather than a more appropriate knot, such as a bowline. Each of the tent’s two transparent entry panels come with both privacy screens and insect screens, yet the arrangements for tying up one or the other, or both, when not wanted, could be improved: at the tops, with toggles hanging down on either side, but with no corresponding loops to pass them through, there is insufficient length on the toggles’ straps to tie them together. Despite these shortcomings, and having now used the tent for camping, I think that the overall design and main materials used represent good value for money.
