Evenflo Triumph - No Longer Recommended! Serious Durability and Safety Issues(FULL UPDATE JULY 2006)
Written: Mar 23 '04 (Updated Aug 29 '06)
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Pros: Inexpensive, easy to install
Cons: Lack of durability leads to safety issues
The Bottom Line: The Evenflo Triumph was once my favorite but after only 3 1/2 years we have serious durability and safety issues and now need to buy another seat for our youngest.
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| mmcphee's Full Review: Evenflo Triumph 5 Convertible Car Seat - Everwood ... |
Shortly after our oldest turned one it was time to purchase her a convertible car seat. I did some research and headed down to our local baby store where I was a given a song and dance about the $200 Britax car seat. The sales woman looked shocked as I corrected the errors in her sales pitch and proceeded to buy the exact seat that I wanted, an Evenflo Triumph.
The Basics
The Evenflo Triumph is a convertible car seat, meaning that it can be used rear facing for children 5-30 lbs and forward facing for children 20-40 lbs and for children 19-40”. There are 3 harness heights and the adjustments and two crotch positions. The harness length is adjusted by using either knob located on the side of the car seat. A lever at the front adjusts the seat to one of 5 recline angles. The Evenflo Triumph features a special memory harness so the harness length does not need to be adjusted every time you take the child out. The soft tan cover is removable and can be machine washed and air dried. There is a pocket to store the instruction manual under the cover. The seat is approved for use on airplanes and has a 6 year life from the date of manufacture, after which it must be replaced. While Evenflo Triumphs manufactured now are LATCH equipped, ours is not.
Installation
This is by far the easiest car seat I have ever installed using a seat belt. Instead of needing to straddle the car seat and reach your hands through narrow slots to pass the seat belt buckle from one side to the other the Evenflo Triumph has a flap in the car seat cover. You lift the cover and the seat belt path is exposed so you can actually see what you are doing when installing the seat using the safety belt.
I have been installing this seat forward facing and rear facing in a variety of vehicles for 3 years and I have never failed to get a good tight fit. The toughest installation was in our 1995 Saturn due to the rather small backseat and the need to have the seat rear facing at that time. The seat has been installed with automatic locking seat belts as well as using the included locking clip for car seat belts without automatic locks. Installation in our large van has never been a problem, but it fits equally well in out Taurus station wagon as well as the grandparents’ mid sized sedans. It is a tight fit on an airplane for getting the arm rests down. Overall I have always been satisfied with installing this seat.
The Harness Height Adjustment
One of the main reasons I wanted the Evenflo Triumph was for the ability to adjust the height of the harness without rethreading the harness. While it isn’t a task you need to do often I truly hate having to rethread the harness on our other car seats. Evenflo seemingly has a better way.
Folding down the cover flap and removing the foam reveals a plastic cover. You undo the clips and the plastic cover falls forward to reveal the inner workings of the harness system. To change the height you slip the harness out of its current position and simply slide them into the new slots, close the door, replace the foam and cover and you are done until the next time. I love that I don’t have to remove the seat from the car to do this. Remember, rear facing the should slots should be at or below the child’s shoulders while forward facing the slots should be at or above the child’s shoulders.
Sounds great right? Over the course of three children I have changed the height of the harness probably 7 times. Now the plastic cover that keeps the harness into the proper slot no longer stays tightly closed. This allows the harness to slip out of position and get pinched in the plastic cover. This makes it difficult if not impossible to adjust the length of the harness, not to mention dangerous. I put in a call to Evenflo but there isn’t much they can do since the seat is long out of warranty and the problem is with wear on the actual shell of the car seat where the clips are supposed to lock into place. Basically I was told I would have to buy a new seat. By the time you notice the straps not sliding easily your child's safety has already been compromised. The straps are no longer in the right position to hold your child in place during an accident.
The Harness Length Adjustment
One of the features that first attracted me to the Triumph was the unique harness length adjustment. Instead of sitting between a child’s legs just calling out to them to fiddle with it, the adjuster on the Triumph is a knob located on the lower front position of the seat, well out of reach of curious hands. This has both its good and bad points.
We have had no trouble using the knob in either of our main vehicles, we have had some problems in rental cars with the Triumph rear facing in an outboard position. If the back seat is curved sometimes the adjuster gets wedged up against the seat back. This has never been an issue in any car when the Triumph is in the center position. That of course seems like the most obvious (and safest) place to put the car seat. But if you have three children in car seats, as we do, you can’t put the Triumph in the center because the other car seats block access to the harness adjuster.
Once the harness length is set I do like the memory harness. The top half of the harness is a double loop. When you slide the buckles up, you shorten the length of the double loop and length the section that is a single strap. This allows you to easily slip the harness off of your child’s shoulders. When you go to buckle you child back into the seat you just pull down on the buckles and the harness returns to its shorter length for locking into the crotch buckle. It does take a little getting used to as the system is different from nearly every other car seat on the market. But after using it a few times the adjustment is a snap.
Buckle Up!
The Evenflo Triumph has one of the easiest to use crotch buckle systems. Each of the two buckles locks independently into the female buckle. There is no puzzle buckle requiring you to fit the buckle together before inserting it. With out Britax Marathon both buckles must be inserted before either buckle locks. If you have ever tried to put an unwilling child into a car seat you know how much easier it makes it when you don’t need three hands, one to hold the buckle in, one to hold the child and one to insert the second buckle.
The chest clip is nice and solid. The male parts of the clip are tapered making it easy to slip into the female half of the clip. Both of my girls had mastered it by 2 1/2 giving them a great sense of independence and the audible click let me know they had done it correctly. Yet neither of them were ever able to undo the clip. It requires significant pressure to pinch the clips together to slip the two pieces apart.
The Cover
The cover on the Evenflo Triumph is soft, plush and comfortable. It can be machine washed and air dried. Evenflo has gone through several iterations of attachment methods, from clips to screws, back to clips and the screws again. Our seat has the easy to remove clips, which is not always ideal. Over time two of the clips have broken off so in two places the cover is held in place only by the elastic that surrounds the cover. This makes it easy for children to pull the cover away from the shell of the seat exposing the foam underneath. Bored hands can then start to pick at the foam, tear it apart and try to eat it. This was not an issue until our youngest came along. Neither of our girls ever fiddle with the seat cover or the foam, but our son did until we taped the cover down to the shell.
We have never had the need to wash the cover of this particular car seat. For us the screws would have been a much better attachment option. However, if you end up needing to remove the cover often for washing I can imagine removing 8 screws each time would quickly become a pain.
The Recline
I like that there are 5 recline positions. In the forward facing position part of the reason that we can get such a good tight fit is because we are able to match the seat recline to the angle of the car seat. In the rear facing position in our Taurus we did need to use a pool noodle to increase the recline to the proper 45 degree angle but it is fine in our van with the recline as is. However the recline can be a little difficult to adjust and should be done before you install the seat in your car. I found that the easiest way to do it is to pick the seat up by the angle adjusting lever and let the weight adjust the angle all the way back. It is then fairly easy to pull the seat more upright.
A Change in my Opinion
For a long time this was my favorite car seat and I highly recommended it to anyone who would listen. No longer. Evenflo rates their car seats for 6 years and I fully expected to get my 6 years out of it. Instead I got about 3 1/2 years of use from this car seat. I’m very disappointed in the durability of the Evenflo Triumph. With the broken harness cover the seat is no longer safe or even usable. If you are only going to use the seat with one child you may not “wear out” the clips like we did, but do you really want to find out?
Final Thoughts
So which seat should you buy? Well, if you child is at an age and weight where they can face forward I highly recommend the Safety 1st Cosco Apex. It will keep your child in a 5-point harness longer than most with its 65 lb limit and then converts to a booster seat to 100 lbs. It is probably the most versatile car seat on the market and at about $120 it is almost reasonably priced too.
If your child still needs to be rear facing, I haven't found a good seat yet. For a child on the low end of the growth curve the Graco Comfort Sport was a nice seat, but don't expect your child to outgrow the harness height before the weight limit. While the Britax Marathon sounds like a nice idea, this is yet another seat that you can expect your child to outgrow long before he or she reaches either the height or weight limit.
My Other Car Seat Reviews
Safety 1st Apex 65
Graco Turbo Booster Safe Seat
Britax Regent
Britax Marathon
Graco Comfort Sport
Evenflo Comet Booster
Cosco Opus 35
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 93
Age Range of Child: 12 to 36 Months
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Epinions.com ID:
mmcphee
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Member: Mary Ellen
Location: Nutmeg State
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About Me:Can you lose 55 lbs and still be cranky? Apparently so...
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