Retractable 3 Story Fire Escape Ladder, 25 Feet

Excellent product — sturdy, reliable, and easy to set up. Worth every penny for the added safety and peace of mind.

Excellent quality bi researched before buying as we needed several for an apartment building. My daughter lives in the building which was added incentive to get the very best.

Hard to review something that is difficult to test and I never hope to use, but I was able to easily mount it in the window And the design itself seems sturdy. It folds up small and stores easily near where we need it. If I ever did use it I'm sure it would damage the walls around the window and scratch up the siding as well. But if I'm climbing out of an upper floor window because I can't get down the stairs, that's going to be the least of my concerns.

It’s great for a second story window. It can be stored in a fairly small area. It’s heavy, so a small child would not be able to extend it or hook it to the window. My son is autistic and just took a disliking to it so it had to go back.

We just remodeled our third floor attic, adding two bedrooms. It's a long drop to the ground, so we are putting a fire escape ladder in each bedroom. I practice deployed the Hausse. It was easy to deploy, and looked like it would work for climbing. I didn't actually climb on it. It was also easy to pack back up - it took awhile, but was straightforward and packed neatly into its original shape. The thing to watch out for is the sharp corners on the steel 'steps' -- each step has an extension on each end that rests against the house. The corners on those extensions are very sharp. Otherwise, it looks like a good product and we will keep it. I will put a warning on the case about the sharp corners.

Easy to use, sturdy

I bought two of these 25ft ladders for a summer home. I removed one unit from its bag and hung it out the window. Yeah, in a pinch it would be a God Send. But, I found two rather mild shortcomings: 1) The handlebars that grip across the bottom of the window are quite wide (I suppose to accommodate thick walls). When draped onto a typical 2x6 exterior wall, there's a lot of play which causes the bars to rock upward on the interior part of the wall as weight is applied to the ladder. Yikes, talk about a scary feeling as those handlebars suddenly shift! But, on close examination it's the window's interior molding that seemed to catch the handlebar and I wasn't 100% confident that my 200lbs wouldn't cause the molding to fail. Then what? I'll assume no one else had this concern, so I'll hope for the best. OK, next: 2) The bright red bag is terrific... but when I placed it in the closet it occurred to me that it's easy to forget its there. Further, the bag's lettering shows "Emergency" in big bold letters, but mentions "ladder" in small letters and only on the SIDE of the bag. Instead, I'd rather see "FIRE LADDER" in huge letters on the top of the bag to constantly remind me its there each time to open the closet door. Without that lettering, the red bag looks too much like a big first aid kit and would be easily overlooked in a desperate situation. 3) In my application, it because immediately evident that only one window in each room was suitable for an escape (since large windows were directly below all but the one). So, not only is pre-planning important, but so too is familiarizing each family member with the ladder and which window to use. All in all, I believe this is the most solid solution for a ladder intended for closet storage. The ideal, however, will always be the type of ladder that's stored in a metal box, bolted to the floor directly below the window to be egress'ed. If your application can accept that kind of eyesore/trip hazard, then by all means get that type of ladder (they do exist).

I'm giving this five stars because if I ever have to use it I feel like it will be well worth the money. Twenty-five feet is a long way to jump, and once I watched them drill into my concrete driveway, it seems really hard.