The kids absolutely loved this and made the effort worth it.
It takes 15 minutes or less to set up, it's well designed for setup. Cleanup? Maybe not so much. You'll realize in about 3 minutes all the marketing photos are taken in the 30 seconds after the kids are told "play on!", because in the next 2.5 minutes the area around the unit becomes a mud pit, no matter how great your grass is, and that then introduces the mud into the water. Not a big deal, just increases cleaning time.
There's really only one flaw to the design, and that's emptying the water. This thing holds a LOT of water and the drain plug is anemic for the volume you're trying to empty out quickly at the end of play time. I love the fact that there is a discharge for the air to flow through so any water that has gotten into the "internal workings" can be expelled, but that little drain plug is simply too small to get the unit drained in a reasonable amount of time. The way the "sections" are designed and with where the drain plug is placed, even if you position the unit on a gentle slope toward the plug, you have to seriously manipulate the thing to work all the water over to the discharge hole, and by the time you're doing that, you're going to just want to flip it all over anyway. The bottom is the most difficult thing to deal with, because it gets good and wet, too, and you won't likely think about that until you go to all the work to dump all the water out, get the grass clippings with a leaf blower, realize that works like a giant hair dryer and can speed drying time, then you disconnect the fan (which is really good, well built and runs great) start to collapse the castle and make your first fold only to have it dawn on you "shoot, the bottom is too wet to put this away". So you have to then figure out how to position things to keep the blower going AND dry the bottom. I recommend a bunch of rags to speed that up.
The idea in the instructions to let the unit run without water to encourage drying is brilliant, and it does work, it just takes forever, even on a hot day. A lot of water can get into the nooks and crannies, and you of course do NOT want to go and fold this up with water hiding in those nooks, because mildew will attack. For me, it was too much water to just dry with towels or rags. I'd have three loads of laundry if I did it that way, so using the inherent air movement worked well.
I'm not going to use this 100 times over the summer, but 5-10 when we bring nieces and nephews to stay over with the grandkids? Yep. It's painful but well worth it. We got 4 hours of entertainment for the 2-8 year olds playing on it, like nonstop. They didn't want to stop but the lawn had become a hazard at that point so we had to shut it down.
Good investment even with the relative pain of cleanup.
Customer reviews for Happy Hop Water Slide Oasis with Aqua Cave for
