Ex display tents , are they worth it ?

[travellingwilbury]

I am after a tent and our local camping place has some ex display models on sale atm .

What are the problems if any of buying one ?

They are displayed outside so I was wondering about the weathering . Or am I being daft and it will be a bargain . About a third off most of them .

I am getting really sadly excited as we have only borrowed tents in the past .

Ask the tent shop. If they said that the tent was still completely weather proof and had no damage at all or missing parts then I would consider it. If they said it is just 'sold as seen' I would not.

They are still on display so I can check for damage and missing parts I suppose . It was the weathering I could only think of .

Now I just have to decide on the tent .

I couldn't believe the size of some of them .

Sorry I meant to say thank you for replying .

The thing I would check most carefully is the groundsheet, it will have had hundreds and hundreds of people traispsing over it if it is a tent big enough to just walk into.

By the end of the season the tents at my local Go Outdoors get sold of and some of the SIGS are literally worn through.

what Wildy said.

UV light also degrades the HH (waterproofness) of plastic tents. I would want to know how long it had been pitched for.

If it had been pitched outdoors obv.

Thank you most of them I looked at had the carpets in them so I would hope groundsheet would be ok but I am worried about the weather stuff . Yes it is outside . And we have had stupid amounts of sun the last couple of months .

So maybe not such a good idea .

The money off was good but not amazing .

Our first tent was an ex-display vango diablo 600, for £100, did us a couple of years holidays before giving it to a friend and we got a caravan. Well worth it for us.

I got a small popup Vango last year at the end of season sale. We used it twice. When we unpacked it this April for use (as we bought it for) as a sunshade/playhouse, the bendy hoop snapped.

Took it straight back to the following week's tent show, and moaned that we knew it was ex-display but for goodness sake it should last a bit longer than two goes.

They had never heard of the hoop breaking before, and gave us a brand new one, no quibble.

I personally wouldn't as they've been out for weeks and weeks at a time, meaning that they've gone through the same hardship as years and years of camping. Also, loads of people have looked at them, touching everything. You don't know what might be stuck to the material. I'm sure the carpets will be OK with a bit of cleaning, but I definitely wouldn't buy a tent.