Was it ever acceptable by code to vent a bathroom fan to an attic? I was helping my cousin over the weekend with some minor renovations to her condo - she wanted to replace the fan in one of the bathrooms, and when I went up into the attic to unhook it I found that both it and the one in the master bathroom were not vented to the outside, but had a maybe 4' piece of dryer duct just tied to the trusses and venting into the attic.
Originally I thought that this might have been a shortcut taken by the roofers that replaced her roof just before she moved in, but either they replaced none of the sheathing or all of it as it all looked consistent. Also I took a look at other similar units as I was walking down the street and I didn't see any vent caps in the likely locations on any of the roofs.
The way she explained it to me was that anything done to the outside of any of the condos was taken care of by the association, not her (e.g. roofs, siding etc.) so knowing exactly who to yell at would be important.
Worst case, I guess, would be that this was a shortcut taken by the original builder some 15-20 years ago, and it's not going to be fixed...
excess attic moisture is bad news and can lead to the roof deck rotting..
you might be able to run a flexible line to a existing soffit vent so it would exhaust there and no one would know:) not requiring condo association approvals etc
You can get grilled vents designed to be installed in the soffit. I'd go that route and it will be fairly easy to do. Venting to the attic is not a good idea but also not the end of the world. I've run into it as well. Sometimes cheapass builder sometimes diy'er that didn't know any better.
You can reduce the risk of problems if you just run the fan when it's warmer outside. When you start to see your breath outside in colder weather, you can leave the fan off, and rely on forced air heating (if you have it) to dehumidify the bathroom and humidify the rest of the house which probably needs the humidity in colder weather anyway.
So, one could take a shower in the morning as the furnace is running continuously.
Probably not. Building codes date from about 1900, and long before then experienced builders knew introducing high-humidity air into an attic accelerated all the problems caused by damp.
I'm not seeing the advantage of not using the exhaust fan during the heating season.
Hot air rises, taking the humidity with it, thus the reason the fans are placed on the ceiling.
Forced air returns are normally placed near the floor to help circulate the air, and if I'm not mistaken, you don't use cold air returns in a bathroom due to various odors that might be circulated throughout the house.
So, what you are suggesting would require that the returns in the other rooms would need to pull the humidity from the upper portion of the bathroom, which would require that all doors remain open for this to even be possible. Even with the doors open, it's going to take a lot of suction to exhaust the bathroom ceiling area with returns in other rooms.
That doesn't even discuss the problems with the moisture condensing on the walls and ceilings of the bathrooms before the returns in the other rooms have had a chance to remove it.
Besides, why do you say the furnace is running "continuously" in the morning? That would depend on how much heat was needed bring the house up to temp, even after a substantial set-back.
Timing a family full of showers with the heating cycle in the hope that the cold air returns will circulate the moisture throughout the house seems like a heat or miss attempt, even if every door was left open.
Perhaps that is the way it was "taken care of" by the Condo Association...
Without knowing how your unit boundaries are described in the applicable condo documents, can't say where those boundaries are for your purposes here...
I would read the condo documents (not the "homeowner's rules" as passed by the board, but the actual legal docs which are filed with your local AHJ which establish the property as a condo development and the association itself) to see what they indicate...
You would then notify the board of directors for the association of a non-code compliant condition which exist in parts of the development for which the board is solely responsible...
What you describe seeing in the attic area is a serious condition, besides prematurely rotting the roof deck which could cause leaks affecting the units, a serious mold problem could develop as well affecting the health of the occupants of the building...
Definitely better to bring it up to the association and see how they handle it, if they drag their feet too long call in the local building inspector and the inspector can send notices of violation and make things happen...
It's perfectly possible that it's not a problem. Depends on whether the attic is well ventilated and what sorts of weather you experience. If the vent drips in cold weather, maybe just put some plastic sheeting below it to catch the drips.
Also, as to remov> Was it ever acceptable by code to vent a bathroom fan to an attic? I
The humidity will disperse throughout the house whether there are vents or suction or not. It's airborne and the humidity is higher in the bathroom but eventually it will reach equilibrium.
If there are such problems. Not everyone has them, especially in houses with low humidity, especially in the winter when indoor humidity is lower, especially if there is no humidifier. And a little condensation does no damage. It evaporates again when the bathrooom humidity is lower, an dit gets lower when the humidity in the bathroom leaves through the bathroom door.
The OP needs to evaluate his particular situation.
Why did she want to do that? Too loud, not removing the vapor fast enough, not removing the smell of cleaning products....?
Maybe that's just a firgure of speech, but you're not going to get anywhere by yelling. The current directors of the condo assoc. didn't build the buildings and the original boardt probably had no input either.
What are you looking for, permission to put a hole in the roof? I can see them giving you permission, but unwilling to pay for what they will see as in improvement to the inside, which the owner is responsible for. Or maybe they'll decide that everyone needs better vents, and they should match, and they'll hire a contractor to do all of them, and each owner will pay the furll price for his share.
I have two bathrooms upstairs back to back and each has a sheet-metal pipe going up to 1 or 2 inches below the ventilated ridge rail. They didn't get in the way of the roofer, who replaced the plastic ridge rail.
I rarely use the fans and I must admit when I'm naked and drying off, it's the least likely time for me to go into the attic, but I think this proximity to the roof, one or two inches, is enough to disperse the exhaust outside. If the roof has any output vents running the exhaust to one of them seems like the easisst and cheapest.
Dunno about code, but it was the common method for several decades in upper midwest. Remember, that until post WWII, bathroom fans were rare. Nobody had AC, and central heat was crude at best. Cracking a window was common year round. At least OP's were hung up high- when I upgraded attic insulation and wiring, along with the roof here, I found the ducts just laying in the insulation. Damn roofer didn't get proper exhaust ports that I had ordered, just tied the ducts off to standard-size vents he added. But, it seems to work okay.
All of those, and more importantly, she didn't like the look of the original fan anyway which was some builder-grade thing that didn't fit her sense of style. She got one of those fan/light combos which just look like a light fixture and have a quieter fan than your typical builder thing, which I installed for her. I left it with a sheetmetal
90 and maybe 3' of hard duct sticking up and strapped to the trusses (roughly equivalent to what was there before, but using proper duct instead of dryer hose) so that she could use the bathroom, but I don't consider it a complete job yet.
In real life I'm a PM so "yelling at someone" is the standard figure of speech for contacting them and asking them to do something :) (unfortunately, some of my customers take it too literally...)
AFAICT if something needs to be done to the roof or siding, the association will hire the contractor to do the work, not the condo owner. So if she just called someone in (or we did it ourselves) she could get her wrist slapped, and she's trying to stay on their good side, as apparently there was already an issue with a storage container staying in her driveway too long when she moved in because the moving people didn't come pick it up quickly enough.
You know, I didn't even notice if she had a ridge vent or not. I know that she has soffit vents because you can see light near the edge of the roof when up there with the light off. I'm starting to like the idea of using a soffit vent, I didn't think of that while I was up there (honestly, I was just thinking that there would be proper venting in place and that at worst I'd have to run to the store and get a transition, if the existing vent was a different size, so I wasn't thinking of all the options.) No gable vents (not possible, units built side by side, although hers is at the end of her block of units, so she does have one end wall.)
No, there are no existing vents that I can see. She has 2.5 baths, and the two full ones are the ones that are definitely not vented correctly. The half bath is on the 2nd floor (of three) and I didn't look for that vent (it would have to be on the back of the building, and I don't think I was ever in the back yard) but that's less of a concern because there's no shower in there.
We also replaced the vanity sink in the half bath and I'll have to take a closer look at that when I am next over there, I'm not sure that that is vented properly with a real vacuum break, it looks just like a regular PVC cap with some holes drilled in it. So definitely there have been some corners cut :(
No windows in bathrooms... this condo is way newer than the houses you're thinking of. AFAIK code does require either a window *or* fan in any bathroom, but I don't remember the specifics of fan installation.
I wish I'd had a fan in the last house in which I lived because the window wasn't enough to keep the bathroom from getting tons of condensation after a hot shower.
I'd take the suggestion to bring it to the attention of the condo board. You could also go over to the local building dept and ask them what was or wasn't required when they were built. I'd bet that in the referenced timeframe of 15 years ago code required that they be vented outside. How the board reacts depends on whether they have some smarts or not.
I've seen plenty of cases where they have been vented just by running flex vent pipe over to the existing soffit vents and just shoving it in the area of the soffit. Not ideal, but I haven't seen any cases where that caused problems either. So, that might be a quick and easy solution.
But, since the potential problems with the existing situation could extend to the entire condo complex, fixing the one you're involved with won't mean much if the moisture eventually causes mold, or sheathing rot in the rest of the place. That will still need to be fixed by the association, with you unit owner on the hook for her share.
I have a fan in my half bath downstairs, and after 28 years here, I still don't know where the air goes. I've got at least 100 hours in the attic, much of it around the stack, I think it's called. I know there's a chimney in it, but don't remember any vent for the powder room. I have two of the small vents on the roof -- I know because I bought replacements when I thought I woudl do the roof myself. And then I gave them to the roofer. If I had, at the other side of my townhouse a similar pipe to the ones from the other two baths, I'm sure I'd remmeber it. So where does the air go?
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