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Vitavia Hera 9000
Vitavia Hera 9000 It looks nice in the photos, doesn’t it? Don’t be fooled. This is a badly designed, poorly engineered piece of rubbish. The metal is thin and flimsy, it’s a nightmare to assemble, and the instructions are awful. And if – sorry, when – you get into difficulties, don’t expect any help from the company. They will be happy to sell you replacement parts at grossly inflated prices: beyond that they don’t want to know. That’s the summary. This will be a long review, as there is so much wrong with this greenhouse. So: your beautiful new greenhouse has arrived. You’ve unpacked the parts, looked at the instruction manual and are ready to go. You start with the metal base - it looks a bit flimsy, but it locks together easily, no problems there. Then the sides. They are too big to assemble indoors, so you lay them out on the lawn or patio, and though it is time consuming and fiddly you don’t mind that, as they slot together without too much difficulty. The roof is not so easy to assemble. You are asked to measure down each of the six roof bars and make a pencil mark where the ring beams are to go. Why? These measurements should be pre-made, with not only a mark but a small lip, so that you can get the ring beams in exactly the right place. But you do this, and you get the roof assembled. Then, with help, you attach the sides together, and you have a completed frame. Except for the six plastic eave ends, which fit into the guttering at the six corners. These, according to the instructions, simply slot in. In reality they don’t, because they are too big. No matter how you try, even by slackening off the corner joints, you will not get them in. You will need to use all your strength just to press one wing in (they clip in under a small ridge in the guttering). In trying to get the second wing in you will break it. There is no way around this. I was unable to fit a single one without splitting or breaking it, so patched them with bitumen tape. Zero out of ten for design. But it’s now that your problems really begin. The instructions say blithely: “Two people should now lift the assembly onto the roof. Connect roof bars onto each corner.” Sounds so simple. But the reality is that this is close to impossible. You will get two corners attached, then with luck three. The rest will be hanging in the air, half on, or to one side of, or in front of, the corresponding corners of the frame. With a great deal of adjusting, pushing, pulling and heaving you might get the fourth one on. After that, no amount of slackening-off and re-tightening, no amount of heaving and straining, will help you to get the others in place. You might come close with one: but every time you are almost there, the bolts which connect the roof to the base will drop out and you will have to start again. The problem is with the design. You have to slot two bolts into the channel in the sloping roof bars, position them over the two corresponding holes in the frame, then slot them together. There are two issues with this: one is that the holes don’t quite align, making it hugely difficult to get both bolts to slot in at once (they need to align precisely, they are about 1mm out and there is no play whatsoever in the holes). The second issue is that there is nothing to keep the bolts in the sloping channel, with the result that over and again they slide out. And if you get only one bolt in you have to lift off the roof bar and start again, you cannot get the second bolt in without removing the first. Frankly this is appalling design. There are so many ways this problem could be avoided. As things stand you have to resort to ingenious ways to try to hold the bolts in place. I tried blu-tac, tape, string and wire. Wire worked best: but to hold it you need another hand, and you already need both hands for manoeuvring the frame, and for trying to lever the bolts over the misaligned holes. It was at this point that I gave up. I knew I could struggle with this for days and be no further on, so I called on the services of two experienced fitters. Even for them it proved a nightmare. Eventually they got the roof on by putting wooden beams along the top of the frame to support the roof, then using ropes and a winch to pull the frame into position. Not something your average DIY fitter could or should have to do. Not something there was any warning or even hint of in the advertising material. But, you’ve got the roof on and you think surely the hardest part is over and the rest will be plain sailing. Wrong. The roof dome is fairly straightforward, though you have to stand on a stepladder which is higher than that listed in the instruction manual. The glazing is also fairly straightforward: the polycarbonate sheets slot in easily, the rubbers slot on the frame easily, and the glass clips in via plastic strips without difficulty. In fact, this was the one and only time during the assembly where I actually thought the design was good – an improvement on the metal clips which are widely used. This part of the construction is marred, though, by the design of the small brackets which fit over the bottom of the polycarbonate sheets to hold them in place. They are fixed by means of small self-drilling screws. Anyone who has ever used such screws knows that they are difficult to get started – even ones with sharpened points need a pilot hole. These are not sharp, and there are no pilot holes in the brackets. So you have to stop, and drill 24 pilot holes before you can complete this task. Then you come to assemble the opening vent windows. I should have mentioned before that in numerous places the instructions are unhelpful. The diagrams are small, it is difficult to see which way round a part fits, and the text, which is very brief and limited, does nothing to clarify things. (Nor is there any online help) You will frequently find you have fitted a part the wrong way round and have to re-fit it. This is the case here – it will take a lot of head-scratching to work out exactly which part goes where But first you have to put the rubber seal around the edges of the glass pane. Seems straightforward, but in fact it continually slips off. The only way to get it to stay on is to tape it every couple of inches – not something you are warned about in the manual. Then you have to get the glass into a narrow channel in the frame. But it won’t fit. You try pushing – no good. After much swearing and cursing you conclude that the only way is to put oil on the outside of the rubber, then use a rubber hammer to knock the glass pane home. A hammer? On glass? Believe me, it’s the only way. But… you get one side on, you turn the frame on its side to get the second on… and the first, which is only gripping about ¼” of glass, slides off. Again after much trial and error you realise that not only do you have to tape on the rubbers, you also need to tape each side of the frame onto the glass before you proceed to the next. When you get all four sides of the frame in place you have to fix them with four screws. The sides have to be precisely aligned – more tapping with the hammer. And it’s easy for them to slip off the glass at one corner: in which case you have to take off the whole side and start again. Frankly, if a GCSE Art and Design student came up with this as a window frame design it would be F for Fail. When it comes to the sliding doors the designer must have gone on holiday and left it to the cleaner, because they actually assemble without too much difficulty. So those done, you are in the home straight. Just need to hang them and the thing is finished. Only before you do so there are one or two bits of finishing off required. The glazing spacers screw in reasonably easily. Not so the six door guides. The designer has saved his best for last. So far you’ve encountered the difficult and the very difficult. Now comes the impossible. You are instructed to fit these door guide bars via self-drilling screws. You are told to drill down through a tiny metal ridge – at an angle – and through another thin vertical piece of metal where it joins a horizontal piece of metal – all the while standing on a stepladder and leaning against the roof. It cannot be done. These pieces can not be fitted in this way. Not only is the design insane, it is dangerous. The screws slip off the metal every time, meaning the electric drill slips against the roof and you slip with it. The screw simply will not engage the metal as required. So you take the metal door guide bars back to ground level and drill some pilot holes. One look at what is required of the screw and common sense tells you it is crazy – but you go ahead and try it. Back at the roof the screw still won’t stay in the pilot holes, but slips everywhere and won’t engage with the metal. You apply a bit more force – but only succeed in damaging the screw head. And of course there are no spare screws. All that is needed to fit these pieces of metal are some pre-drilled bolt holes into the sides. Instead, this insane screw-into-thin-metal nonsense designed by a moron and passed by his less-intelligent colleague in Quality Control. I gave up, drilled my own bolt holes and completed the job. There is more, but I’ve reached the review word limit. So to sum up: this greenhouse is not fit for purpose. It should be withdrawn from sale until all these design problems have been addressed. If that does not happen, Trading Standards should get involved to ensure that it is no longer foisted on an unsuspecting public. Note: I’ve omitted details of the emails and letters I exchanged with the company. Let’s just say they are in denial about the greenhouse’s shortcomings.