I have one in my current house. Having at one point developed surface mold/mildew in my last bathroom, I'm being careful to try to remember to use the fan. Questions - how long should it run? Like, is turning it off when I leave the BR sufficient, or should it run longer? Do any come with timers?
I'm thinking about eventually replacing it with a model with a heater in it. (I remember having an old apartment that had an overhead infrared(?) heater that felt good in the winter). SO my other question is wouldn't the fan just suck the warm air out? And actually, does it also exhaust the warm air in the house when the heat is on? (I'm not particularly concerned about that, more curious. Although it did make me wonder if the hot air from an overhead fan/heater combo had any chance of actually warming the room up).
We installed a timer switch for our master bath fan, mainly because we both shower there and don't want the whole master suite getting mildewy (this is Florida, where mildew eats shoes :o) I set the timer for about
30 min after shower....no mildew. The timer was difficult to find at local stores, but finally found one at Lowe's; only one-hour was available locally. I believe there are digital timers, too, but ours has dial. Our fan is a noisy old clunker, prob. original to the 35 y/o condo.
All fans will pump out heated air in the winter or cooled air in the summer. No getting around that. If you get an IR type heater lamp that heat will be more effective and result in less wasted heat because it's radiated instead of just heating the air around the fan.
How long the fan needs to run depends on what was going on in the bathroom. If you washed your hands, it doesn't need to run at all. If you took a long hot shower, it probably needs to run for 10 or 15 mins after you leave.
I recommend that you check when you buy a timer. I prefer the old fashioned wind up ones. I got a Hunter timer from whichever store it is that sells Hunter fans. I found out it was a bad deal. It has a battery in it that needs to be replaced when it runs down. Replacing the battery involves removing the cover plate and snapping the guts out of the timer body. It isn't a really big job, but it isn't something that a lot of people would care to undertake. It definitely isn't like replacing the battery in your camera. By the way it isn't an AA or AAA battery, it is some kind of 12V battery.
Also I found out that I couldn't just start the timer and walk away. That causes the battery to run down rather quickly. To conserve the battery you need to wait till the timer turns off, then go back and turn off the main on/off switch. Not a very good way to run something in my opinion.
I took that timer out and put in one of the rotary switches.
And most likely an open space below it.... probably even big enough for a little fan air return.
Unless there is some shag carpet from the 70's under it. Wow, shag carpet! That's one thing I don't miss! I just thought of how it got it's name. The British "shag me" and carpet thick enough to keep from getting carpet burns on your knees! Hu? Think so?
One problem with some digital timers is extra features you don't need and complicated, non-intuitive controls. You have to find the instructions, a piece of what looks like slick institutional toilet paper, with Chinese instructions badly translated into something almost but not quite English.
I think you have that reversed- 'shaggy' long predates the British slang for doing the nasty. I'd speculate the term came along after shag carpet came out. If it didn't perhaps it came from what doing the nasty does to the oh-so-perfect hairdos that were required in the mid-60s amongst the mod set.
One of you language geeks out there care to jump in?
Last on I had experience with was a wall box-mounted digital timer to run a client's basement ventilation fan. Pretty simple application: only needed to turn the fan on and off twice a day to move air, exact times not even critical.
Installing it was easy, and the instruction, contrary to what you said, were actually written by a native English speaker, on decent paper, with lots of illustrations and fairly clear.
Except for one thing: they described programming "events", and said you could have up to (forget the exact number, maybe 12) separate events. I assumed an "event" meant turning the device on and off at set times; sounds reasonable, right?
Well, I couldn't get the damned thing to work. Programmed it 4-5 times, tested it at the programmed time: nothing.
It finally dawned on me that an "event" was the smallest programmable unit, which was either turning the thing on or off. So what I thought of as one operation actually required two "events", one to turn on, the other to turn off. Using that, I got it to work properly.
Poor documentation design, I'd say (from experience as a manual writer), plus it makes for a very dubious marketing claim ("program up to 12 events"). One normally assumes an event means turning something on *and* off.
And don't get me started on the programming complexity of these devices, with their teeny-tiny LCD displays that can only be read by a
10-year-old or an adult with a strong magnifier, requiring umpteen keystrokes to program a simple time sequence (with a jillion options I don't need like automatic seasonal adjustment, daylight savings mode, etc.). Too much stuff crammed in there for any kind of reasonable user interface.
One counterexample I can give is this timer from Intermatic I installed recently:
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Very simple and easy to program. I used it in a client's house to control two sets of outdoor lights, by wiring it directly into a junction box. The programming sequence is actually intuitive.
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