There have been a number of occasions when we’ve been away that it has chucked it down with rain. I used to have a Coleman event shelter that we could all shelter and cook under however attached to the van is an awning, if I added a privacy room to it then I wouldn’t have to run from the van to the event shelter, I could just step out the door into my rain free space.

Fiamma privacy rooms are not cheap, usually upwards of £1000 new, looking on eBay there were a good few available all for F45 awnings, ours is an F65s.

The difference between the two is the F45 awnings mount directly to the side wall of a motorhome whereas the F65 awnings are designed to mount on a roof using brackets, in our van these sit in the roof rail so the awning casing sits back from the side of the van.

I figured this wouldn’t matter too much and was delighted when I picked up a whole privacy room for £150, bargain !

It came with the fast clip 2.0 system which costs more than £150.00 on it’s own.

You have to buy a couple of brackets which fix to your awning casing which were abut £20.00 so the fast clip rafters have something to attach to on the awning, I put those on and offered them up, they fitted, result.

That was in 2022 and I’d not had a chance to put the side and front panels on until the weekend of Volksweald when the good old British weather promised to belt down with rain.

We arrived and I hastily put together the privacy room in about 30 mins before the downpour.

As you can see it’s not the greatest fit!, part of this was due to my hasty assembly.

For starters the front panel should only require the addition of a door panel to fit the length of the awning, it doesn’t, you have put an extra infill panel in which then makes it 10cms too long.

Moving inside you can see why this is designed for an awning that mounts directly to the side of a motorhome and not an awning that is set back from the side of the van.

Moving to the sliding door side, if you have the supporting side bar installed vertically not only does it leave a gap as above, it also fouls the sliding door so you have to put the pole at an angle which then leaves a gap at the top and the bottom.

Despite these gaps when the rain did come it actually kept most of our stuff dry but it’s clearly not a good fit overall.

Fiamma do make a privacy room specifically for a sprinter, from what I can see there is extra material on the side panels to fill that gap at the top and guess what, its over a grand and there aren’t any second hand ones, you don’t seem to be able to buy the side panels on their own either.

I’m still undecided as to whether I’m going to keep it or not, I’ll use it again at Bug Jam and hopefully have a bit more time to play about with it and make it fit, it’s going to rain when we get to BugJam so I’ll need to use it, then make a decision about it’s future when we get home.