Do electric roof fans rust enough that they must be replaced?
My fan, in the pitched part of the roof, looks like new from the inside. The plastic top, the metal screen**, and the metal frame below the screen. all look perfect.
**Not wire screening but sheet metal with a lot of holes in it.
But the roofer who came yesterday wants to replace it, because he says, it's rusting.
He also says the new one will be better, new thermostat, new humidistat.
My current thermostat works fine, I never take steamy showers or baths so I don't need a humidistat.
I do believe there is some rust (maybe at the outer edge of the frame) and around the holes where I nailed the fan to the plywood 35 years ago. But I doubt if there is much and new nails can be put in an inch away from the old nails, where I'm sure there is no rust at all. Will take 3 minutes.
Probably his removal / re-install labour ... fiddle farting around to preserve the old one would pay for a new one. And doing a clumsy job on preserving the old one would compromise the new roof. John T.
Your new roof should last 20 to 30 years. Will the old fan? Do you want to have the roof disturbed three years from now? In the scheme of things, it does not cost that much for peace of mind.
The new roof should last 20 or 30 years - yup - if it's done right this time. Putting in a new one makes sense BUT.The new fan is unlikely to last 20 or 30 years. Make sure you get one that can be dissassembled without removing it and buy a spare so you have parts when required - otherwise the roofer will be telling you you need to replace the roof next time the fan goes bad. Just sayin - - - -
This is a townhouse, and it came with and still has a ridge vent that's almost as long as the house is wide, and a full length soffitt vents both front and back.
People in this group have told me years ago that I shouldn't have needed a fan with all this ventilation, and all I can say is when I bought the house in May, without leaving the AC on, I'd come home after work at around 6 and the 2nd floor was too hot to enter. It was still too hot at 10 and at 11. I'd eat dinner and sleep in the basement, and go up stairs in the morning. This went on daily for weeks.
After I put in the fan, it was 10 or 15 degrees cooler upstairs, still without the AC, and I almost never needed AC at all. So you'll never convince me the fan isn't a great thing for my hosue.
I really should have said that he's not recommending a whole new roof and the one piece of plywood he wants to take out is elsewhere (Actually the piece he wants to replace is right below where, in an earlier thread, you all noticed the damaged ridge rail and the shingles that were now an inch below it..
So no time spent on removal or reinstall, unless he comes up with something new.
Sorry, I should have said that this 2nd guy isn't recommending a new roof, just selective** repairs, so I'm still going to need a whole new roof in few years.
So maybe his saying the fan needs replacing should have been reserved for people getting a whole new roof, and he just said it without thinking, out of habit?
**He hasn't sent a list of repairs yet, but he told me a new ridge rail, one piece of plywood, covered by new shingles which may not match but can't be seen from the ground anyhow, repairs to some popped nails, and maybe other stuff will be in the list.
You have a good point there. I've had to replace the motor for this fan three times, and it's possible from the inside.
It's tricky because, because of the motor brackets, the blade makes it hard to take the motor out (and without gravity to help, even harder to put it back in), and the fan has 3 sort of L-shaped brackets that come from outside and together make a ring around the motor.
The brackets are mounted on rubber things somehow, so the motor vibration doesn't get to the house, and I don't know how to disconnect the brackets from their mounting and wouldn't try it if I knew how. The rubber is still in good condition after 35 years but I would think that would fail first. When disconnected at the motor, the rubber mounts let the brackets move up and down and to the side, to some extent.
It was tricky enough to change the motor, but the 3rd time, they put a
1/8" plastic band around the motor where the bracket goes, so I couldn't fully tighten (until the brackets touched each other around the motor) the 3 bolts connecting the brackets. It used to fit that motor perfectly. (The plastic band seemed like it be very difficult to take off, like it was stuck to the metal, but I didn't realize all this until I was in the middle of it. If there's a next time, I'll call the motor company first and see what they say.) EVEN THOUGH, the motor has the same model number, with no suffix or anything, as it did the first time I replaced the motor. It's gotten bigger but the model number stays the same.
I'm a little curious. Do steamy showers or baths affect the humidity in the attic space that much? My bathroom vent fan exhausts to the outdoors, so I've never thought about the humidity that might leak around the fan housing. (The attic access--right outside the bathroom-- has a gasket.)
I had a customer once with bathroom exhaust fan that went to the roof but had bad water stains on the ceiling around the vent in the bathroom. Problem was the exhaust duct between the vent and the roof was exposed in the cold attic (in winter). It didn't leak but it got bad condensaton when the duct got warm from a shower and condensation ran down the outside back towards the bath ceiling vent.
Solution was to insulate the exposed duct in the attic.
Gary , the scenario you presented is physically impossible ! Water condenses on COLD surfaces , not warm . I suggest the cold attic chilled the duct causing the warm moist air inside to condense on the INSIDE . It's still gonna cause the damage you described as the condensation wicks out into the surrounding drywall/plaster/whatever . Solution is the same ...
That's a good question. My fans, from two bathrooms side by side, exhaust to an inch or two below the roof ridge rail. (I'm not sure where the first floor fan vents to. Maybe I'll look) Not sure why, maybe it saved a little money not to have 3 holes in the roof, three vents, and the trouble of roofing around them.
But the instructions that came with the fan talked about running the fan after one took a steamy shower. Because I guess, the humidity would be bad for the wood in the attic. I don't know if home-priced humidistats existed in 1983, but the instructions might have mentioned them too.
One of the bathrooms had a separate switch for the fan, and two of the first things I did were, in the bigger bathroom, put in a light over the sink and in the housing for that light, put a switch for the fan, which I promptly turned off and havent' turned on since then. The new light was half way between the ceiling light and the wall switch, which had also controlled the fan. (And still does. The fan won't run unless both switches are one.)
And in the powder room, it was going to be too hard to put in a wall switch so I just unplugged the fan, in the ceiling. That fan is meant, iiuc for odors, and of course there are none.
When my mother moved to Baltimore, to an apartment whose bathrooom(s?) had no windows so they put in a fan, I put in a switch for each, a pull-chain right through the housing. I was like a typical tenant who considers the changes he makes improvements and not damage. The apartment never complained. I had asked my mother and she hated the fan's noise as much as I did, even though it wasn't much noise.
With a ridge vent do you even need a fan? Years ago I put one in that stopped working. With new roof, roofer just put in a passive vent. Now with a second new roof with ridge vent fan is not needed.
I also had a next door neighbor whose fan failed and set the roof on fire after midnight when they were sleeping. If another neighbor coming home late had not seen it a tragedy might have resulted.
Yeah. When we moved in to our house the bath fan was flex-ducted to just below a roof vent (no ridge vent on our house). We quickly changed that to vent out a hole in the relatively nearby gable end. At that time, my husband was a little timid about making roof penetrations so the gable end seemed like a reasonable route. (He got over the roof penetrations thing.)
All of those fans are supposed to vent to the outdoors, not the attic.
The manufacturer recommends running the fan after a shower to dry up the bathroom. So people don't get pissed off with their product and badmouth them on the Internet. They aren't really interested in protecting your dwelling from moisture damage. And their warranty says so, quite explicitly. Cindy Hamilton
Bingo! Generally accepted best practice today is a ridge vent. And if you have a fan too, it's likely not helping anything, it may be making it worse. The fan to be effective needs to be up high in the roof. That's where the ridge vent is. So the fan will pull air in through the ridge and blow it right back out. With just a ridge vent, the air flows from the soffit vents through the attic, out the ridge.
That's a concern of mine too. I had one in one section of the roof and when it failed, I decided to just disconnect it. That roof section has a gable and this opening which is non-power now. When I get a new roof, the fan location will be closed and a ridge vent installed.
Something does not seem right. If you have a ridge vent, the fans will be sucking much of the air from the ridge vent and not the soffitt vents and probably would not do much cooling unless the ridge vent was closed off.
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