The Esplanade offers the comfort of a spacious rectangular bag and adds the warmth of a hood. This is the bag's best attribute; the hood adds five or more degrees of warmth to a hoodless bag.
Unfortunately, the benefit of a hood is partially offset by a series of drawbacks due to the bag's low quality and poorly designed features. The zipper is the lowest quality of any budget bag tested. It catches easily — one tester said that it caught every time he used the bag — and feels prone to breaking (in comparison to the 70 other sleeping bags we've tested). Although the hood adds warmth, it's not comfortable when cinched and creates a poor seal around the face and neck area; hot air escapes through convective heat loss, especially when you move around. Our testers found the bag to be warm to the low forties; a 20 degree rating is highly optimistic.
