Upgrade Bathroom Fan - Reduce Shower Moisture

time to depart from my typical videos on photography and technology and bring you something else that happens in the real world today I'm standing inside of my bathroom and behind me you can see stains on the walls and we're talking about excessive moisture from the shower and a relatively small bathroom and that is what I'm going to tackle today before we get underway I'm just going to level set I'm in a relatively small room and I do not have a lot of labor Mike on today I'm going to use the microphone that's built into this camera so I apologize in advance for any audio difficulties that we may encounter now to level set this right here this is my shower and about six months ago I remodeled it and I put a fresh coat of paint on and also updated the fixtures and I also put a new vanity in and what's happened is that this shower has been used excessively and right now you can see perhaps on this video behind me and off to the sides the paint looks different now it's not wet although it looks wet it's really dry but the reason for this is because the moisture in this shower and a long long hot shower puts moisture on the walls and that moisture starts to wick some of the pigment out of the paint and it leaves behind what you see right here so I need to get in here and fix this there's a couple of things we want to look at to start with you want to look at the ventilation and this is the fan right here this is my exhaust fan now this is a very basic fan and I happen to know that this fan is rated at 50 CFM so CFM stands for cubic feet per minute and what you want to do any time you're faced with the situation like this is you want to take a look at your fan and you first want to ensure that it's working it might be a little loud right now because turn the fan on and what I have right here is just a regular piece of paper one way to test if your fan is working take a sheet of paper like this turn it on put the paper up to the fan and see if it sucks back up into it that's what I'm going to do see that so this tells me that my fan is working and it seems to be relatively strong the next thing I did was to check the gap between the bottom of the door and the floor you want to ensure that you have about a half inch or more of clearance so I was able to easily get my fingers underneath and that tells me that my clearance is good you have to have air coming into the room and this to pull the air out and work to wick that moisture now a couple other notables here is that when this shower runs we've had the fan going the other thing is that when the shower is done we leave the fan on and we leave it on for probably at least 20 minutes or so so when I see the situation that I see here knowing that at the start of my renovation which again was around six months ago this shower was used heavily and I can't ensure with 100% accuracy that this fan was always left on my kids were using this shower so you kind of get what to get there but I do know that in the last four months or so three or four months that we've been very very adamant about leaving the fan on and I think that the situation's only gotten worse so next step we want to measure this room and see if we have the right fan for this size of room how do we do that but we're going to figure out the square footage measure the length times the width and then also take into consideration the height of your ceilings now I've already done that with my testing my trusty tape measure here and I am measuring about 45 square feet in here now I have nine-foot ceilings so I'm going to multiply that 45 by 1.2 now if you have eight-foot ceilings you can multiply by 1 or 1 one it's not an exact science but that's a pretty good gauge at one point two times 45 I'm getting 54 CFM now this is rated at 50 and keep it in mind that rule of thumb at 54 is just a general guide so my suspicion is that this fan is not strong enough to wick the moisture out of this room so the plan replace this fan and then the next thing I'm going to do is once this is replaced I'm going to repaint this bathroom now the sheen on here is a gel so I'm going to go with semi-gloss but what I want to focus on for this video is just replacing this fan so let's jump right in and make that happen first thing we're going to do is take this cover off the fan most of these fans are held on just by hangers so we're just going to pull that pull this cover down just a little bit and the hangers are suspending the cover from the housing so we should be able to get in here and there's little wires and just kind of pinch these wires together and I'm going to pull this cover off there we go we have our cover off next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take a measurement of the current size of our fan this appears to be about seven and a quarter by seven and a half now keeping in mind that we're not looking to replace this fan with an identical one we need a stronger fan and chances it are that this stronger fan is going to be bigger than our current housing and that's okay before we set out to buy a new fan we want to check our studs or the studs going this way or this way and where are they located so for that I've got my trusty stud finder here and what I'm going to do is we're going to see where the studs are okay it appears that I have a stub running this way right here which makes sense the housing of our current fan appears to be bolted to our stuff going this way I'm going to run my stud finder further down to see where our next studs in it okay next up is line up down here so we have plenty of room now we have this this sort of custom layout here where this corner comes out the stud is really pushed back a little ways so from here to here is roughly about a foot by looking at it and keeping in mind I have no studs going this way so I just confirmed that our studs are definitely running this this direction and not this way so essentially when I go to find a new upgraded unit I can look for one that's going to go from here all the way back to here and we're going to cut the drywall out a little further and we're going to we're going to do so in this direction I'm back from the store and I pick this up right here this is the AR 110 now it's called 110 for a reason if you look right down here you'll see that this is rated at 110 CFM it also has a noise rating of 3 I really care much about the noise I don't care if it's quiet or loud but the CFM rating is important keeping in mind that the old one is rated at 50 so this is more than double in addition based on the calculation of the square footage of this room multiplied by one point to determine that this room needs 54 CFM so this is more than double the calculation as well so I feel pretty good about this something I want you to note though is the exhaust vent now all the boxes that you see if you're shopping and you go out to your Lowe's or Home Depot's or Menards whatever they will tell you the dimensions of the housing itself in addition to the exhaust diameter so this is noted right here on the box now what this tells me is we need 10 inches by nine and a quarter now we measured this out and plenty of room for that and you'll also note here that the exhaust is 4 inches so I know that this old basic unit right here is a 3 inch exhaust so what do we do well when I was at the store this goes from 4-inch and a 3 inch so this should work out just well it's just something to keep in mind if you look for a super duper big CFM or fan you might notice that maybe it requires a six-inch exhaust in this case right here the highest I saw at the store was 180 to 200 now I like that and it had a bigger housing to it but it also had a six-inch exhaust now they do make an adjustable coupler to go from 6 to 4 and you could use your 4 to 3 but I really want to go up in just increments you know once you cut into the drywall I can't cut back but I can always cut more now if you do need to cut back let's say you're in the situation where you have a much bigger opening you can do that but you're going to have to do some drywall repair that's not too difficult but when you have a textured ceiling like I do it's more difficult so nonetheless let's go ahead and jump right in you want to take a look at the power so most of these have a motor right here that's going to plug into what looks like a typical outlet which is going to be right here and I know that this is turned off at the switch now I'm going to want to shut the power off to this bathroom because I have wires that will come in to this right here even though it's off at the switch it's always good to be safe so unplug this right here and what we want to do with this older unit I'm going to want to try to remove the guts of the housing first and then I'm going to pull the housing out and let's go ahead and see if we get the gun so this has a little tab both sides right here there's only one tab over here I know that this housing mounts because I had a stud over here so what's going to happen is I'm going to try to get this tab out right here and I I don't really this is just kind of a really light type of metal so it just kind of bends there we go turn then this in a little bit so we can get it down and that looks good so if I can slide this out you can see just how dirty and caked up this is next trick is going to be to get this housing removed this is a view of the housing from the other side and right here you can see where the exhaust is set to go out now again this is supposed to be three inches up and down the fan housing was installed when this house was built and I'm going to show you what I came across use a flashlight and do my best here I'm not sure how well we'll be able to see this but what they used is a staple and you could just see it right there in the corner so what I'm going to need to use is a pry bar of some sort to pull that out and it's on both sides it's on this corner and then the opposite corner over here so I'm going to use a pry bar and pull that out we'll get this housing removed after using my pry bar and some tin snips and screwdrivers you can see the carnage left behind this is the other side and as you can see I'm really having to get medieval on this to get it out and this is anchored in here as well I broke the housing free as you can see right here and it just took a little bit of effort to try and pry and loosen that up and cut it and break it but I finally got it so the next step is we're going to want to pay attention to the electrical which is right here and you want to be sure as we do at the start that the power is off at the switch which in this case it is now if you have people running around in your house it's not a bad idea to shut the power off at the breaker and I'm going to go ahead and do that now just to be safe power is now shut off so it's going to be a little dark but you can see right here this is the plug for the for the motor that went into this fan so this is our connectors right here these are the wire nuts you go ahead and take these off I'm going to pull the electrical wire through the housing now you just didn't get the housing now that we have the housing out I flipped the line now that we have the housing out I put some caps on the wires and keeping in mind these wires should be dead anyway because the power is controlled at the switch but what I wanted to show you is that this is my exhaust vent right here and it's probably tough to tell on the video but that is actually four inches so I had three inches going into that and it looked like what the Builder did is they just pulled that tubing up to the three inch and then they taped it off which is okay what this means is that I'm going to have a four inch going into four so I will not need that adapter so that's a good thing what we want to do is we want to pull this motor out of the housing and in this particular unit it's not too difficult to do there's a tab right here that we're going to use a flat headed screwdriver on and put that in to just pry it away there and there in this motor will lift up and out put this in I'm just going to pry this away pry this side away put my hand inside and pull on the motor just like that take that out as well these tabs are used for new construction so because this is a remodel what we want to do is take these tabs we're going to fold them back into the housing and just get them out of the way so you're going to take a pair of pliers and I'm just going to bend them this little brute force--and just push them back in we're going to do this to both sides there should be tabs just on the two sides so this is the other one right here and you can see that the base of the new housing is going to be much larger than our opening now I know because I've already measured the studs that I have a stud here and I have one back here so I have plenty of room going this way and I have plenty of room this way so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use this as my corner point right here so I'm going to extend down just a little further and then we're going to come over this way so we're going to do this is I'm going to put this up here just like this and I'm going to look on this side I want to try to line up as close as I can right here and then on this side over here I'm going to use this pencil and just make an outline so that way I know about where to cut with our outline in place here grab a drawable knife kind of like this right here just you'll want to have line around you might also be able to use a blade of some sort like a box cutter and score it now in my case I'm going to go ahead and use this Bromwell knife and it's going to get a little messy for sure so let's just start cut this is cut and you think it's good to go always dry fit you want to take this and ensure it's going to fit it doesn't fit just cut a little bit more and keep going until it fits now that looks pretty good right there and we're not going to we're not going to screw this into our stud just yet there's a couple things we need to do to begin with we need to need to run our electrical right here through our feet hole which is right here so it's going to go on the back side like this again I've got these capped off and we are shut off at the outer switch but before I go ahead and wire this up I'm going to go ahead and go out to the breaker and power it off there as well just to be safe so I just fed my wires through I'm going to push this up in here all right so I have the cover off and I'm going to go ahead and undo the wire nuts all right now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take these existing wires right here I'm going to go black to black white to white and we're going to go green to copper green is our ground so let's go ahead and take care of these is my black to black and what I'm going to do is just twist ideally I could use a pair of pliers and really wrap these on here but the wire nut is going to help us out so once I've twisted that up use my wire nut and put this on here and you want to screw it down so it's nice and tight and what that's doing is it's gripping those wires together give it a little tug be sure it's on there good and then do the same for your white last but not least don't forget to put your ground on now your ground you can just coil around and you don't have to wire nut the ground now we're all connected up and what we want to do is place all these in here and slide this up and in and we'll be in good shape after securing the electrical connection here and sliding the fixture back in I went out turn the power on off the breaker so we can have some more lights in here this might be a little tough to see but right now this is the exhaust but this is about as far as I can pull this through so I have just about an inch maybe a couple inches to work with and this is our exhaust vent so fortunately again this is four inches into four inches but I'm going to slide this in to our tubing right here and then I'm going to see if I can get see if I get some tape around it just to ensure it stays connected all right we're this nice and taped off it's nice and secure we're going to slide this back up and then as you can see I have the vent pushed in right here and there is the small screw that helps to keep this nice and snug I don't know what that screw is really needed I mean it seems like it's firmly in place there are two retention tabs that are built into the housing right here on this side so this is ready to go and what we need to do right now is we need to secure the housing into the joist which again runs this direction right here it didn't come with any screws but I have a couple of decking screws here these are relatively small considering they're decking screws but nonetheless these have some teeth to them and these are good wood screws that will dig right into the joists so I'm going to get up in here and matter of fact I'll probably grab my drill and drill a couple of pilot holes to get these to stick we're ready to put our motor into the housing now and so I have my motor right here and essentially it's pretty simple you just need to line up the exhaust with your exhaust in the housing and the way this came out is we had two self-contained retention points inside this housing was the front in the back so I'm just lining those up right now you should just be able to slide this back up in it's time to plug it in and we're going to test it out with everything in play I have a flashlight here so we can see the fan we're going to go ahead and turn on we're going to test it out now one thing to note is that there is a spot to put a screw right here and there's another one over here now the manufacturer says they're in the park bag but again I didn't get a part bag this just looks like a machine screw and this motor is actually snapped into the housing so it feels like it's secure I'm not really concerned about the screws but if you're doing this project and you have the screws go ahead and put these in let's go ahead and turn on see how well this works so there we go sounds mean yeah so what I'm going to do is go ahead and put the grill back on and then we're going to do the paper test again and just ensure that it's actually sucking air out it feels like it now that I've successfully installed the fan it's time for me to move on the rest of the project which I'll say for another video I'm just going to go ahead and paint this bathroom put on a nice semi-gloss coat and then I'll keep an eye on the situation to see if this new fan helped I suspect it well if you find yourself in a similar situation hopefully you feel confident enough to go ahead and tackle this project on your own if you found this video helpful be sure to give it a thumbs up and if you haven't done so subscribe to the channel it's called the real world we're often than not I post videos about photography and Technology but I also post them about everything that happens in the real world such as a wet shower bathroom like this right here so until the next video take care of yourself and be safe

Channel: RealWorld

Views: 870,163

Keywords: bathroom fan, wet bathroom walls, bathroom shower moisture, replace bathroom fan, replace exhaust fan, upgrade bathroom fan

Id: hzogRM-E_sU

Length: 25min 39sec (1539 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 28 2016