Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This review is mostly about my experience with this sail, rather than the product itself. This shade sail was super cheap and came quickly and as described. Unlike others (e.g., Tuosite), it is actually waterproof, and is remarkably cheap for being so. If you're smarter or more experienced than me and know exactly how to properly install one of these, you can stop here and just order it. Otherwise, read on and let me possibly save you some headache and ruined furniture. I installed this sail on the posts of a pergola that is about 8'x10'. I tried to install it so that three corners were attached high and one corner was attached low, in order to have rain water drain from that fourth corner. This was a good idea in theory but for a few problems: 1) If you're trying to protect an 8x10 space, and you want to install this per factory specs, you need to tie this to things that are farther away from the space you're trying to protect than 8x10. This is kind of hard to explain, but the reason is: the sail needs to be pulled tightly at the corners so that the sides can appropriately bow (kind of like a spider web). So for me, with my 8x10 pergola dimensions, I could probably install a shade sail that was about 6' x 8' in order for it to work the way it's supposed to. So since I was trying to protect the whole 8x10 space, I was faced with having either a too-loose 8x10 shade sail or a too-small shade sail (as you'll see in #2, I opted for too loose, which didn't work out so great). 2) the sail requires a considerable deal of pressure to be stretched tightly enough to make a taut, flat surface for water to slide down--way more pressure than can be applied by hand (if you watch professional installer videos, they always use turnbuckles to get sufficient tension, and I wasn't sure my pergola could handle that, and the sail was too big to have space to do that anyway). I learned this the hard way. After installing this as tight as I could by hand I tested it quickly by giving it a shower with my sprinkler, and while a bit of water collected in places, it did not leak at all. So my family and I left for a weekend camping trip during which a rare and heavy rain hit our neighborhood. We came back and the shade sail had become a giant water catchment system, probably holding at least 300 pounds of water, and stretched beyond recognition into a huge pregnant belly. Basically the tension was not high enough to keep water from pooling, weighing it down and making an incrementally bigger pool as the rain continued. I was kind of surprised it didn't pull the anchors out of the pergola, or even collapse the whole structure. It certainly ruined the shade sail. Good news was that the waterproofing was so good, it kept that water up there the whole weekend (that is, until I quickly and carelessly tried to empty it and it dumped all over me and my stuff). 3) I've now learned that the best way to install these things when you're trying to pull the corners tight but don't want to use turnbuckles is to have two diagonally-opposed corners attached high and the other two diagonally-opposed corners attached low (like, a lot lower, probably at least three feet, because you need the low corners to be lower than the natural bow between the high corners, if that makes any sense). The problem with this is that because you have to angle the two low sides downward, you cover less area at those corners. So for your 8x10 space, if you got an appropriately-sized sail to pull tightly, you might end up only covering a 5x8 or 6x8 area underneath it. My couch is much bigger than that. So after ruining the first Akuna sail I bought, I bought an 8x8 Tuosite sail, thinking I had figured out how to install it as in #3. As you might guess, the 8x8 sail covered only about 8x6 of space after the angling, which was too small for my couch. Also, it leaked like a cheesecloth. And it was twice as expensive. Don't make my mistake. So I went ahead and bought this one again (even though it's $10 more than it was last month). Am I a glutton for punishment? Hopefully not. Basically, I'm going to install it as noted in #3, but run a taut rope across the two diagonal high corners mentioned in #3 and drape the sail over it like an old school camp tent, reducing the natural bow between the corners (since I'm not going to use a turnbuckle). This should enable me to keep the other lower two corners higher than they would otherwise be, thereby extending the amount of space I can cover underneath. I tested it with the Tuosite cover before returning it and it seems to work. I'll try and let you know how it goes. Good luck with your shade sail and I hope this might help one or two people.