Jane Strata 2011 Not so Detachable hood

[frogmatt]

Ok so i'm not a mum but an inquisitive dad to be. We were looking to buy the Jane Strata car seat but having had a look at the seat this morning noticed that the sun hood on the the new 2011 seats appears to be zipped to the carry handle that when in use in the car should be moved rearward to the car position. Is it me or do you have to unzip/rezip both sides of the hood every time i put the seat in the car? This also appears to be the same on the Matrix.

Hi frogmatt,

Just using my wife's account after gaining her permission (I know who's boss) and am another Dad who spent many hours researching the weight, folding mechanism, build quality, safety, design, etc etc when looking for our pushchair. We have the Jane Rider travel system and have the Strata car seat in Memories colour scheme. You are correct in what you say about the design of the hood however, we have found that you can simply slip the back of the hood off the seat and fold the hood down with the handle when using it as an anti-rotation device. Dropping the hood in this manner takes a second or so and coupled with the isofix base takes us less than 10 seconds for the whole process from opening to closing the door. I think the hood has been designed this way to provide better protection from the sun as it covers the sides and comes further forwards than the old design. It may not be quite as slick as some of the others but the rest of the system makes up for this very minor inconvenience. It was one of the smallest folding systems we could find and is easy to open and fold, it looks great and we have already had a few compliments on it despite only going out a couple of times (our little one is only 3 weeks old so not been too far just yet).

Our little Girl loves the car seat and has been very comfy - I like to think the reclined position helps when in the new born setting (lowest position) with the back support that raises up. It would be nice to have the insect net feature but to be honest it probably wouldn't get used by us much.

All in all we love the whole Jane package. The build quality is great and the materials are lovely.

Most of the travel systems seem to be pretty good in this price range (the ones we looked at anyway) so think you'll be fine whichever you decide.

Let us know how you get on.

Geoff (Claire's other half).

We had that model of strata car seat for DC4. We initially had the hood zipped on wrong but when DC4 was a week old we went to get the Isofix base the man at the shop corrected it.

You don't need to unzip the hood to put down the handle. If you sit in front of the car seat with the handle clicked up, pull the hood up and the hood material comes up over the handle and do up the zips under the handle. The black peak of the hood sits under the handle.

Let me know if that doesn't work and I will try and write it clearer.

Ps I really liked the car seat and normal sized DC only outgrew it at 17 months. It is bigger than the maxi-cosi cabriofix I had had for other children.