Help with bathroom fan

[Rounds74]

Hi I'm after some advice about a bathroom fan I've had fitted. We paid quite a bit in all but have found the fan has made no difference - paint still peeling off walls, mildew on walls, water puddles on floor etc. We had the guy come back out, he told us we need the door or window open, no difference. He came out again today and has now said that there's no duct or tube attached as it was hard to access our attic. Is this safe?! We live in an old house so less damp the better and had new roof put on last year so don't want that being water damaged. He had told me it would be hard because of attic access but said he would find a way around it and the roofer would possibly feed the duct down. I'm really shocked to find out this fan is just blowing into our attic with no ventillation bar one roof tile. Am I right to be angry or is this considered standard? Any advice will be appreciated.

 

[rjm2k]

That is a bodge job, firstly leaving doors and windows open defeats the whole point of the fan and will not extract correctly. Secondly, the fan should be properly ducted, all at's doing at the moment is sending all of the moisture to the loft! Is this an internal room? He could have just gone straight through an outside wall if not, no need for loft access!

Sounds like a right cowboy.

 

[pjcomp]

First off the fan should have been fitted so as to vent to the outside world, not the loft. That said, just venting into the loft wouldn't send the damp back into the bathroom. A fan on its own is never the magic bullet to cure bathroom condensation.

Better than any fan is having a window open when showering/bathing. Don't create lots of steam by having 20-minute hot showers! Use bathroom paint on the walls which are formulated to resist the damp and peel less easily. Clean the walls down with a dilute bleach or one of the proprietary mould removers - once the mould spores have taken hold in the plaster they'll regrow at the slightest damp.

pj

 

[Grenage]

Speaking as someone who recently DIY'd an in-line extractor through his loft:

Yeah, you should be pretty angry that an extractor was hooked up to vent straight into the attic - that's atrocious. It was a nightmare reaching the soffit fascia from the inside, so I did most of the securing from the outside.

If you can get a roofer to install a tile vent, and hook the extractor up to that, it will be fine.

We don't know what fan was fitted, so we don't know how much it will extract. Ideally you'd have a 1cm gap under the bathroom door (or vent), with the extractor furthest from that point. Make sure that the loft is well insulated above, and avoid letting the bathroom get too cold.