16 out of 16 people found this review helpful.
OK, but not the best
Date of Review: Apr 1, 2008
The Bottom Line: Might work for some, but would not recommend for most
We bought this gate to fit across our upstairs hall to keep our toddler from hitting the stairs during the bedtime routine. The way our stairs and wall are, we really can't install a top-of-stairs gate, so we figured this would keep her contained while we were getting everyone ready for bed (she has a gate on her room once she's tucked in, but she doesn't want to go in her bed till the older siblings are in their beds). Since it's the hallway, we wanted to be able to put the gate up and down as needed and not leave it in place once everyone was tucked in. For some people this gate may work great, but for us it just didn't.
Here's the pluses:
Movable
If you need to be able to use this gate in more than one location, the fact that it is pressure mounted rather than hardware mounted is a definite plus. (We found moving it not to work too well though - see below in negatives section).
Fits wide openings
This gate will fit openings up to 60 inches without any additional parts needed.
Unfortunately, we found more negatives with this gate:
Tough to adjust and put in place
In order to adjust the gate to the width you need, you have to turn one end of both the top and bottom rails until it reaches the desired width. This is much more time consuming and difficult than any other gate adjustment we've had. I'm not sure if this method was used since it was a wide-opening gate, but it's not great. It's not exactly difficult, just not very efficient. Once you do get it adjusted, you have to push the rails in to compress them enough to snap into your opening. While this sounds easy enough, the strength of the tension bar (while this sounds like a plus) makes it rather difficult to do. Seems like it shouldn't be quite so tough to do.
Needs frequent readjusting
Since we were putting this gate up and taking it down each night, maybe our experience is different than if you mostly kept it in place. However, we found that the width adjustment would change slightly and you'd have to readjust it at least once a week. I think it would be fine if it basically stayed in place, though, but of course that then detracts from the plus that it's movable.
Didn't contain our toddler
The daughter we bought this for has generally been our easiest child to contain with gates, but she knocked this gate right over by basically running right into it. Obviously not every child would do this (and she didn't even intend to and just got going too fast), but it can definitely be knocked over by an active child.
Overall, this gate just didn't work for us, but I can see how it might for some people. I'd say if you need a wide-opening gate that will stay in one place most of the time and you need to contain a crawler or toddler that doesn't tend to run around a lot, it's probably OK. For most people though I think there are better options out there.
