Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

OK so what I REALLY want is to convert our deck into a conservatory that you can remove the glass from in summer and replace with screening. That isn't too much to ask, is it? (If you're a movie-star, it isn't!) So until I become rich and famous, I ordered this to make our summer outdoor meals a little more pleasant. I only expected it to keep the bugs off, but I was pleasantly surprised at how it also improved the ambiance of my little outdoor dinette set. The black color of the screening makes it feel SO much cooler under the umbrella. Maybe it actually IS cooler (I'll have to test that with a thermometer sometime!) but it really feels much less like you're being blasted by late-afternoon sun. I haven't had the problems other reviewers had with the water bladder around the bottom leaking. This may be because I didn't fill it very full - not halfway, really. Water is pretty heavy - you don't need a lot of it to weigh something down (and we've had a couple of high-wind storms since I put it up, and they didn't affect it at all.) I also figured the black color would make it really swell up in hot sunlight so I left it kind of flaccid. It works great that way, even though we are always kicking it back and forth across our splintery deck to get it out of the way, and it tolerates this abuse just fine. (We kick it in toward the dinette when we want to make the diameter smaller, to get around it to get to the grill and/or yard, and then when we're eating inside the screen, we kick the bottom outward to maximize the space inside. Oh, yes, the space inside is MORE than adequate when the bottom is extended out all the way!) It probably WOULD be easier to install on your patio umbrella with two people, but I have to to everything myself around here, so I've become pretty resourceful about that. Here's how I did it all by myself: Just lay the open umbrella down gently on its side, on two of its ribs while it's open (I didn't even bother to remove it from the center of the table to do this - just tilted the whole assemblage) Then drape the screen over it with the adjustable hole in the middle. To adjust the height/fit so that the water-filled bladder will reach to the ground when you stand it up, just pull it across so that it's long enough to touch the table legs/bottom of the umbrella stand/whatever. Tie off the adjustable drawstring, then stand the umbrella back up. Voila! You have just earned two more points on your ResourcefulWoman Badge, and you don' need nobody's help with nuffin!