Daily Home Renovation Tips

In Part 1, I wrote that I was all set to install my self two new bathroom timers for the fans in our bathroom to stop wasting electricity for all the times I left the fan on for hours on end. It’s a cool looking timer. Notice the timed settings in the picture below (with the face plate off):

Well, now we run into two issues once I removed the face plate off of the wall switches. First, the wiring. I was able to replace the light switch in the laundry room myself to install the switch for the wireless wall switch. The wiring in the wall looked like other wall switch wiring I had seen previously.

However, this was different. When I removed the face place off of the current wall switch and then unscrewed the current fan switch I noticed that there were more wires. One wire was come from the adjacent light wall switch to the current fan switch. And, there appeared to be other wires in there.

I am not an electrician. I’m just an average joe homeowner trying to get by. So, I re-screwed the current fan switch back into the wall, and re-applied the face plate to cover it. I know when I am licked.

Then the other issue. Bennett, the very nice gentleman who actually performed the installation of our new kitchen cabinets also hooked up the electrical and the plumbing for the new kitchen as well.  I called Bennett as he works in the town where we live if he cold come over and look at something in the house (unrelated to the bathroom fan switches) and while he was here if he could take a few minutes and install the light switches for me.

Well, once he looked at the packaging, he said I would have to return the timers and get a different one. When I asked why, he said to look at the packaging more closely:

The front of the package seemed to indicate that these were timers for lights! I didn’t even look at what the sales associate had handed to me. Shame on me (at least in part). Bennett saw that the packaging had the picture of the light bulb right beside the word ‘Timer’ which indicated that it was not for a bathroom fan.

Fans, when they are turned on  use 3 to 4 times more electric ‘juice’ to start the motor. Once the motor starts to turn the fan, then they consume a much lower amount of electricity. However, when a light is turned on from a wall switch, it immediately uses the same amount of electricity, according to Bennett. So, this would likely cause the breaker on the electrical panel to flip when the switch was used to turn the fan on. Per Bennett, it’s happened to him many times so that he never uses a light timer any more for a bathroom fan. Get the one made for the fan. Made sense to me.

So, my task was to go to the retailer and make the exchange. Bennett said he would return the next week and then install them for us. I did go back to the retailer who indicated that the ML on the packaging and the 20Amp indicator meant that it was fine for bathroom fans.

But you know, I trust Bennett. Plus, as I soon discovered, there was another reason which I ended up exchaning these type of fans for another type. We’ll talk about that in Part 3 of this series of articles on Bathroom Fan Timers.

Our ECOENERGY page contains all 15 of our articles outlining various details of the Energy Efficiency Evaluation (i.e. energy audit) report we received on our home as part of our participation of in the ecoENERGY Retrofit program.

In the report, one of the recommendations was to include a timer for the switch on the bathroom walls used to turn the bathroom fan on and off. When I read that it was as if I was in one of those “I should have had a V8″ commercials on television. What a great idea. I am always forgetting to turn the bathroom fan off. And, many times it runs for hours on end. What a waste of electricity.

And, as it turned out, when I attended the local energy conservation fair where I won the interior solar blind the big box building supply retailer happened to have a booth with energy conservation products, including a bathroom fan timer. It looked really great, nothing at all what I imagined. It actually looked pretty cool!

So, the next time I went to that retailer’s store in our area I asked a sales associate where I could find them and that I was going to use it for the bathroom fan. I picked up two for $29.99 each.

Notice the product pictures below. In particular notice that, similar to the wireless wall switch product, this product is also like an iceberg in that most of it is hidden behind the wall. This could cause challenges upon installation for sufficient space for the wires and connector caps.

So, a day later I attempted to install the product. After my success with installing the wireless wall switch a few weeks before (as we described in a prior articles) I was confident that I could install these as well. Once I found the switch on the electric panel to turn off the power to the bathroom I proceeded to remove the face plate covering the wall light and fan switches.

Uh-oh. Dorothy, I don’t think we are in Kansas any more. Come back tomorrow when I reveal why I did not install these products. It’s not just what you think.

To continue with the next article in this series, simply select this link to Part 2.