Erica's First Retrofit - Privacy Glass Window Tints

When we were looking for a vehicle to convert into a campervan, one of the 'nice to have' items on our wish list was dark tinted windows. It wasn't high enough up our priority list to make it feel like a compromise when we bought Erica with her clear windows.

We looked at getting her windows tinted last autumn, when we finished the build, but with lockdowns and other demands on our time, her glass remained unmolested. I didn't consider their tinting to be a priority issue, so was happy to wait. 

Then we went on a few trips, both local day-trips where I wanted to get changed after a run, and a couple of overnights, and it highlighted quite how useful those window tints would be. To strip off or use the toilet initially required the tedious exercise of closing all of the curtains (then, of course, re-opening them and buttoning the tie-backs). That quickly became tiresome enough to cause me to have a little think, which resulted in the application of a couple of bits of velcro such that, rather than putting the front curtain up across the cab, I could suspend it diagonally from the rear central pillar to the back corner. With that in place, plus the rear blind put up*, and one rear curtain closed, a 'bathroom' was created. It was a lot less faff, but the space created was compact in the extreme.

That brought us back to the need for window tinting, and also persuaded me that a 5% tint would be better than the 15% tint I thought I'd settled on (5% = 95% light blocked etc). 

All we needed to do was to book Erica in somewhere to have the tints applied ... or bite the bullet and give it a go ourselves. I fancied doing the latter, albeit with the conviction that we would do it remarkably badly, rip the film back off and take it to a professional after all, wasting the money spent on buying the film.

In April I bought the film and a couple of weeks later I finally opened the package, read the instructions and chose a fine day to see how I would fare as a window tinter.

The story of how it went, and the outcome, can be seen in this video:

(*In reality, most times I didn't bother with the rear blind. When backed into a space on the edge of a car park it's reasonably unlikely anyone's going to walk behind your vehicle.)