TL:DW Yes it is a good bag.
Oxford Aqua B-25 Hydro Backpack: The front pocket zip will probably let in water as it wears and the bag blocks some vision when you do shoulder checks, otherwise I can’t fault it.
I’m not sure why it is advertise as a motorcycle specific bag? I see no adaptation or reason that it would be. I use it riding a motorcycle, cycling and walking, all the same to me.
Music in the video is copy right free, Movie Studio 2022 Sunrise.
yeah so in this video I’m just going to go over this which is the Oxford Aqua B25 uh roll top kind of bag um I’ve own this bag for a year now um it’s called aqua because they claim it to be waterproof and the 25 basically relates to the size of the bag so it’s a 25 L capacity bag uh first things first I do recommend the bag and I do think it’s really good but it’s not entirely waterproof um if we unzip this and put a hand into this kind of front pouch basically all the way down around the area is where this front pocket is and this is your kind of easily accessible kind of pocket so I’d imagine a lot of people might put phones and stuff like that in there um keys and whatnot and the problem is that this black stuff which I can show you on here which is kind of meant to be it waterproofs the zip and it stops water getting through the gaps every we basically zip that back up you can see the issue there and after about six or seven months use I noticed that this stuff had started to fray um and what that means is that when it does rain this pouch will just fill out with water so you have to be very careful what you put in here um yeah if you put your phone in there it could be a problem or any paper paper documents anything like that and the other thing is there’s no drainage holes at the bottom so it will just fill up um and when it rained there was a storm maybe two months ago from the date of this video where I was riding my push bike and it literally filled up about half of this pouch so yeah this area is not waterproof not anymore anyway um the main area is because in order to kind of block any water going through here you just roll the bag um I prefer actually to roll it backwards and then you just basically roll it to where you want it to go you use the little kind of side fast fening clip and then there is a little lever there which is a bit short for me to grab but you essentially just pull on that and you get it to where you want it to be how tight you want it to be and whatnot so yeah once that’s kind of rolled it’s very difficult for any water to get into this kind of area um there is this rear pouch as well um which does have a hole here so this isn’t waterproof because this is basically designed for hydration packs so you can have your straw sticking out and you can have a drink when you’re Maybe riding and then jurob bike or cycling or something like that so yeah the main compartment is waterproof but the other two are not um so yeah let’s look at some of the features it doesn’t really have a lot personally I don’t think it needs them you have this Loop here which is designed if you’re cycling you’d run like a rear brake light on there and click that onto there so people can see that nice and high on your back and you basically just have these two mesh kind of pockets which I guess are for bottles or something like that um personally I don’t really use them I could kind of do with all without all this stuff it doesn’t really bother me um so yeah I guess the next thing we should look at is the size of the bag so from the bottom here all the way to the top in the biggest kind of unrolled form you’re looking at 70 CM um the width of the bag roughly is about 40 cm and if we roll the bag down to the smallest size which I would probably say is up to the straps it then changes from 70 cm to a 50 cm bag um so there’s your kind of dimensions and in terms of what you can fit in this 25 L pocket I did another video when I came back from shopping so I’m going to run that now and then I’ll get back to you with the rest of the review yeah so I wanted to do is try to show you the capacity of the bag I have had bags that are bigger in their capacity but they had multiple Pockets so overall you couldn’t fit as much in them I don’t really know how that works but that’s how it was so we’ve got a bit of shopping in here we’re just going to weigh it and the reason I want to weigh it is because it was still a comfortable bag to wear didn’t like hurt my shoulders or anything like that yes so we’re eight we’re 8.6 on the old scale 8.6 kg uh kilos as you can see we’re up to about or if we have do this you can see better yeah we go I go into the bag so yeah the shopping I’ve got stops about there so we still got this much which is probably about 20 cm something like that 8 Ines of the bag left um as long as you roll the bag a little bit even just this end bit it will still be waterproof so you let [Music] see [Music] so there you go you’ve seen what you can kind of roughly fit in there um the other thing is I had two uh cying crash helmets and that still gave me a bit of space at the top so potentially you could fit two cycling crash helmets in there maybe a pair of gloves maybe one of those roll up jackets something like that maybe a pair of plimp soles smallish kind of shoes um to give you some idea uh the other thing I wanted to look at now is comfort so generally with that uh clip that I just showed of all the shopping the bag weighed about 10 kilos um roughly anyway and I would say the comfort’s okay if you do load a lot of stuff up just be aware that if you put a lot of stuff here and it’s kind of bulky and sticky it’s going to just dig into your back there is no there’s no padding in this area so whatever you put in the bag is going to kind of push against that and protrude maybe a little bit or you can feel it on your back is what I mean um they do give you some padding I guess after a year it’s kind of softened up but it’s still pretty substantial um the padding on the straps is pretty good as well um I’m quite happy with it after the year probably say you’ve got about 10 mil so centimeter of foam padding on there they do give you as well a belt which is what this velcro area is for and I’ve never actually used it but I’m guessing oh there we go so that’s the velcro area and then you can stick a belt on there and that will just give you a little bit more kind of uh support and bring the bag closer to the bottom of your back maybe to stop the bag kind of uh Levering away from you like I said that’s it’s all right it’s got some foam there it’s not totally flat but it’s got a little bit there but personally never used that it’s pretty kind of standard kind of big clasp on there easy to use if you got gloves and that on there um so yeah I think the comfort is pretty good uh the bag is pretty good obviously we’ve gone over the pockets so what else is there um I guess the downside is that this lets in water I guess the other thing as well is that when you are riding with this kind of bag you do tend to have quite big like corners on it so when you look over your shoulder what you’re going to end up seeing is like from here where this uh fluo yellow is this aluminous yellow is to here is going to be in your vision so whenever you want to change lanes or do anything like that and you look over your shoulder to check that it’s clear this will kind of obstruct some of your vision so there is that to think about but um yeah realistically other than that I think is a really good bag this waterproof in issue when I first got the bag it was totally fine so it could just be my kind of I don’t know use maybe there’s some sort of oil you can put on there to lubricate that um but yeah generally it’s a very very good bag and out of the three roll top bags that I’ve used um it’s probably the best one I think they’re around 50 so yeah it’s definitely worth it in my opinion
1 Comment
Nice review, thank you