Full review

When the first caravan with a slide-out side was launched in 2011, it drew crowds at the NEC show. People queued to view the Inos, a twin-axle caravan like no other. Now, the manufacturer has launched a second Inos – this time with a slide-out side twice the length of the one on the initial model. At 1890kg, this caravan’s 310kg lighter than the first Inos, yet it has the same 7m body length. Our test Inos was the prototype; production models are 100kg lighter, at 1790kg MIRO. The available payload is a massive 700kg – much more than most people would ever need.
Inos caravans are made by the Fifth Wheel Company, at Ruallt, Denbighshire, close to the North Wales coast. The chassis is the BPW model, with the iDC stability system.
The extending side section slides out at the touch of a button. All you hear is the whirring of 12volt motor and, in seconds, your living space expands. Everywhere, the solidity of build is impressive.
The construction is wood-free; it consists of vacuum-bonded body panels, all glass reinforced plastic; no aluminium is used. The panels are 35m thick; the core is Styrofoam. The Fifth Wheel design technicians tell us that the thermal properties of Styrofoam are higher than standard polystyrene. Polyurethane is used on the corners for added strength and, because polyurethane is an insulating material, the Inos’s corners are fully insulated.
The heating system is Alde – and this one heats the caravan from under the floor. When you step inside the Inos and take off your shoes, you can feel the heat under your feet. The control panel is Alde’s new, small, square unit with a touch screen menu that’s much easier to navigate through than the more commonly found panel. Vanmaster and Inos are the first British caravans to have the new panel.
The layout of the Inos creates a lounge-dining room with two settees. It’s very domestic in design and feel. The bed runs across the caravan, with the pillows in the slide-out section. A wardrobe forms a suggestion of a divider between the day area and the bedroom. A pleated partition is there to track across the caravan to create a complete divider should you need it.
The kitchen is on the nearside, with a large fridge with separate freezer alongside. The shower room is across the full width of the rear, with a sliding door.
 

Showering

The shower is enormous, at 73cm deep and 86cm wide. The base is vinyl but looks like granite and is textured to create a non-slip surface. Five LED clusters, set into the ceiling, provide plenty of light. Three cupboards, one under the washbasin and two built into the wall alongside the toilet, all have catches that you simply push to open, so there’s no need for handles. Very neat.
There are two wall-mounted towel hooks and a rail running the width of the shower at ceiling height. The mirror is probably the largest we’ve seen in a caravan, occupying the whole of the area between the shower and the cabinet to the right of the washbasin. The result isn’t only great for vanity, it makes the shower room look even more spacious than it really is. Step out into the bedroom and you can enjoy yet more fabulous space…
 

Sleeping

If you can build a house on common land in one night, you can claim the land as yours… That ancient Welsh tradition is called Ty unnos in the Welsh language. It translates into English “in one night”, which gave the Fifth Wheel Company the idea for the name of its caravan. Night-time attributes, therefore, were right at the heart of the Inos’s design…
The Inos is a four-berth. You have a double bed plus a settee that’s also a single bed across the front. It’s 7.18m long and a second settee, 1.88m in length, runs along the offside in the slide-out section. Whereas most fixed-bed caravans find their appeal chiefly among couples, the Inos is a practical family four-berth, because the single beds are full adult length – and all you have to do is roll sleeping bags out along them to make them into beds.
The bedroom is a very special area. It’s 2.8 metres wide (of which 68cm is the slide-out extension). Unlike any other caravan with a transverse bed, you have 50cm of corridor space at the foot of the bed. And, also like no other caravan, it has a dressing table that’s more than 2m long and 40cm deep. The top is creamy-white, and gleams like highly polished marble. Underneath, in the centre, are five wide drawers. Cupboards are on each side, with push-catches and no handles, as on the cupboards in the shower room. Three wide overhead lockers complete the suite of furniture that looks far more home than caravan.

 
Storage

There’s more storage in the bedroom cupboards and drawers than you’d ever need. One of the cupboards in the dressing table is above the Alde central heating unit; the shelf is made of slatted sections, so this is effectively a drying cabinet for damp shower towels.
There’s storage space under the bed, as you’d expect, and yet more under the front settee. A section of the offside seating area extends into the central floorspace, creating an extra seat – and when you lift up the top of the seat you find there’s a storage space beneath.
The wardrobe is the full depth of the slide-out section, with two drawers beneath it.
Two top lockers, 40cm deep, run across the front of the caravan. The front line of the Inos is almost vertical, so these lockers are high as well as deep.
Overall, storage opportunities in the Inos are more than adequate for the needs of a family of four.
 

Dining

The dining table is an irregular shape, wider at one end than the other; it’s large enough for four place settings. Usually in caravans where the seating is L-shaped, four can’t sit around the table. But the Inos – as in so many other respects – is different. Two can sit alongside each other on the offside settee. One sits at the end of the front settee and a third can occupy the eating area that extends from the offside settee. The table is housed in clips on the wall of the wardrobe. It’s substantial, on chunky metal legs, so is fairly heavy to lift into its housing. But that’s not a problem, because we think the only time you’d do this is for towing; the lounge is amply large enough to keep the table in place all the time if you wish.
 

Lounging

Two can lie back with feet up on the settees; even tallest caravanners will find enough length here. And up to eight can sit in comfort on the    Inos’s settees.
An Avtex television is an option; on our test caravan it was mounted on the nearside corner of the lounge. Ceiling lights are amazing. Each has five rows of LED lights; warm and cool tone bulbs are in alternating lines, all behind simple clear plastic panels. Under the front window a deep sill gives you a surface that’s useful for books, the coffee, the wine… This is a brilliant lounge in terms of living space and seating configuration.

 
Kitchen

Cooking equipment is four burners, a grill, oven and a microwave mounted above the freezer. The sink is triangular, creating surface area alongside it – but there’s not a lot of surface. The designers of the Inos have overcome this problem by fitting a hinged extension, giving you 45cm width of surface to the right of the sink. But it comes across the doorway, which is not ideal. This feature was the only aspect of the Inos that we didn’t feel was practical.
Three drawers are under the sink. They’re styled to look like four drawers, with handles evenly spaced from one another but in fact there are two deep drawers and one much shallower, ideal for cutlery. The arrangement is practical but these drawers are the only lower storage space in the Inos kitchen; this aspect lost it some marks. Two cabinets above the kitchen give you ample places
to store tableware but there are
no racks for plates, bowls or
mugs here.
A slim cabinet to the left of the oven opens to reveal two rails on which you can hang tea towels, keeping them neatly out of sight – that is a brilliant little feature.
 
 

Towing

With twin-axle geometry and the added assurance of the iDC stability system, the Inos should behave impeccably in theory… It looks an enormous beast of a caravan, so would it feel a monster on the road? We had a minor Welsh hill, a few corners, and a straight stretch in which to find out. We did the tow test with the Fifth Wheel Company’s Nissan Navara. The nose weight of the Inos, with one gas bottle in the front compartment, was a respectable 70kg.
Stability was impressive; the mighty Inos proved to be every bit as easy to tow as any other twin-axle model and more stable than some. Manoeuvrability in reverse is always easier with two axles than one, because the response is slower and more accurate – and the Inos is
no exception.
Overall, this is a caravan with positive, stable and straightforward tow characteristics.