If you want to jump right to the repair howto post click here
How did my bathroom fan get hacked?
No, there’s not any secret computer chips in it, or NSA recording devices watching my every move. Well I hope not, I wouldn’t want to be the agent on the other end monitoring that footage. What happened is my exhaust fan in my bathroom fan / light combo stopped working, and I had to figure out how to get it working again. I’ll admit it stopped working a few years ago, and we’ve gone without the exhaust fan part working for a while now.
The bathroom fan and light combo was originally installed in 2010 (i know this explicitly because after our wedding on 10-10-10 <– Yes that’s real (& it was Canadian Thanksgiving), we built a bathroom. The fan was installed during this renovation. A Big thanks to all of our weddings guests that helped fund this renovation, i truly use your wedding gift everyday 😉
Fast Forward a bit to around 2015
It was around 2015 / early 2016 that the fan actually stopped working (I’m almost certain) because I remember thinking that if there was a warranty it would have probably been about 5 years (IF I WAS SO LUCKY). I could have bought this fan closer to the end of the renovation, and perhaps just squeaked it into the 5 year mark, but that receipt was long gone, and proving it would be a lot more hassle than it was worth.
Instead I went to Lowe’s, where i had originally purchased the bathroom fan, to look for a replacement. My plan was to just pop out the fan box with a new one. This seemed like the easiest route to go. Originally we went to Lowe’s because they had a much better selection that Home Depot had for bathroom fans. Ours had a nice chrome (nickel) finish with a frosted glass cover. (For some reason i lost my photo of the light with the glass installed.) I will edit this post with an updated photo of it hopefully once it goes live.
Anyway I had no luck finding a match to this light. Which was strange. They didn’t even seem to have any nice looking bathroom fan’s anymore. They only had the generic square white / ugly looking ones. The same that home Depot had 5 years prior.
Speaking to an associate I found out they no longer carry the “Designer styles” of bathroom fans anymore.
That sucks… So I looked online, Lowe’s (in the USA) seemed to have it listed, however shipping to Canada was not an option for me.
Online retailers had ones that looked similar but i wasn’t 100% sure they matched inside, and i had issues with shipping as well. I didn’t want to buy the wrong fan either and have it not fit. I would either be out about $130, or have to tear a hole in my ceiling to put a new fan in. (I also have an issue where the output of this fan box is DIRECTLY against a ceiling joist cross member) Not a true joist just the fire block. So I originally had to notch it to accept the exhaust piping. If a new fan didn’t line up exactly i was int he attic making it work.
Bathroom fan meet back burner.
So it seems I may have exhausted my options at this point, so i took a break. I wasn’t overly concerned about the fan not working. The light still functioned, and even if it didn’t I still have 5 other lights in this bathroom (but that’s a story for another day) or when you sit on my toilet and ask why there’s a spotlight pointing at you… seriously don’t ask.
before you yell at your screen and tell me to call the manufacturer, i tried looking for their information on the fan, and it was not the easiest to get a hold of. Finding their phone number seemed to be a tricky task, so I honestly just left the whole thing for a bit.
Eventually I started digging into their company a bit and came across a website that was Spanish i think, but it had their company name listed and a phone number, so I called it. I explained the situation, and their response to me was rather deflating. “We do not manufacture bathroom fans anymore, we only manufacture ceiling fans now.” I ask about old stock parts, or Service parts for repairs needed to old bathroom fans they produced. “We no longer support any old products.” I don’t know what their policy is, but my company seems to have to keep parts around for 15+ years for service vehicles. a measly 5 years and they don’t have any old stock parts anywhere.
So here we are I must figure out what to do. Essentially I figured out how to retro-fit a new fan into the casing, BUT this post took up quite a bit of space. So rather than double or triple the page with a how to, I am going to simply put my how to on another page, and you can read all about it here.
Here are some teaser pictures of the hacking I did to get this fan back up and running again.
So If you were in this situation what would you have done? Found a way to retrofit something in there? Replaced the whole fan unit with a new model? tore out the entire bathroom and rebuild it around a new fan style? burn the house to the ground and start over? Honestly tho let me know in the comments below what you would have done if you came to a dead end on parts like I did.
Onto Part 2 and how i repaired the bathroom fan >>>.