Bathroom Fans
When we bought this place, the exhaust fan in the main bathroom didn’t work. I had a quick look in the ceiling and found them to be hard-wired (at least I was fairly sure this was the case), so I just swung it down, put some machine oil in the back of it into the bearing/bushing, spun it by hand a bit and it started working… but I was reasonably sure it was going to need replacing sooner or later, because what I’d done was not a permanent fix in my mind.
Fast forward almost five years and that fan’s actually still running - but the other one ceased functioning during the summer. Unfortunately the same thing that fixed the main fan did not fix this one - try as I might I just could not free this one up and there was zero free-spin in it after some 15 minutes of trying to lubricate it. Sabriena prefers that shower (the small tiles on the floor of the main shower are not pleasant on the feet, the en-suite shower has a textured plastic floor), but she was showering with the window open and it was fine, there wasn’t really any moisture build-up.
But we’re in the part of the year where that’s not really tenable any more, so I texted our electrician about it… the first thing he said was “those should have a socket, you should be able to replace them yourself?” I reiterated that I’m about 99% sure that they’re actually hard-wired, so he agreed to come out and could squeeze us in the next Monday, ie today.
He also said it’s better if we buy them, that way he can just drop them straight in, so I measured the hole (about 300mm) and went looking at Hammer Barn’s website and found… nothing. Everything was 250mm, that can’t be right! So after work one night we went in to look, taking the cover of one of them with us, and found that the actual size is apparently 290mm.
The next thing I wanted in them was I really kinda wanted one that had a damper flap on them, because in summer you can feel the heat radiating down, and in winter there’s a bit of a draft under them too. I also wanted them to move a fair bit of air. We found the Mercator BE4300SPWH which looked like it’d do the job, so we picked up two of them… they’re a bit spendy compared to the others (a cheap 250mm unit can be had for about $30, these were $105), but like I said I really wanted to start looking into doing something about the draftiness of the house and this seemed a reasonable way to start.
A pretty quick job to cut the old ones out, put the sockets in, test the sockets and the RCBO they’re attached to and we’re away.
I didn’t realize until afterwards that these actually have fairly poor reviews (primarily complaints about not moving enough air, or not removing moisture, with one instance of them dying prematurely), but they appear to be doing the job… but now that there are sockets in the ceiling I don’t need an electrician to replace them if they end up packing up.
I’ll keep the boxes for a few weeks just in case…
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