I was having issues with way too much steam/moisture building up every time I showered, opened up the fan to see if it needed to be cleaned and it turns out it doesn't actually vent to anywhere, just makes noise and blows air around in that little box. Bit pissed at this because not only is the bathroom intolerably damp every morning, the bedroom is small and poorly-ventilated enough that the whole room gets muggy if I leave the bathroom door open to dry it out.
I'm in a shitty apartment so I can't make any major modifications, what's the best solution here? It's technically within code because the small forced-air output register that rarely runs and does absolutely nothing counts as "mechanical ventilation". Would a dehumidifier be helpful, or too slow to make much of a difference?
>I'm in a shitty apartment so I can't make any major modifications, what's the best solution here?
Move.
I'm stuck here for at least another half year or so
The city code just says "Bathrooms, flush toilet rooms and laundry rooms shall not be required to meet the openable exterior opening requirement if mechanical ventilation is provided.", I assumed a central air system with a register in the room technically fulfilled the "mechanical ventilation" requirement, even if it didn't really do much to ventilate the room.
Does that generally refer specifically to a purpose-built vent fan?
I'm not not from US, but aren't most of your central air systems just heating/cooling with no actual ventilation (the systems seem to be closed loop with no fresh air intake). In which case it shouldn't count.
>systems seem to be closed loop with no fresh air intake
All normal central air systems operate this way to conserve energy. Otherwise the heating/cooling would be released to the outside.
If a bathroom has a central air register/vent, however, it would still act as somewhat of a ventilation because the rest of the house is less humid than the bathroom. Therefore the central air would disperse the humidity from the bathroom to the rest of the house, rendering it imperceptible. It then dissipates as the air in the house naturally leaks outside and vice versa.
apologies for my english, I am Chinese.
Assuming that it's been adopted, the International Residential Code requires that the exhaust from the bath/toilet room be ducted outside -- it is not allowed to circulate into the rest of the house including attics or crawl spaces. For multi-family residences (condos, apartments, etc.), the International Building and International Mechanical Codes have similar rules.
So central A/C systems would not be acceptable as a form of mechanical ventilation for a bathroom.
I'm not a lawyer, but
>openable exterior opening
means a window to the outside and the
>mechanical ventilation
would mean a fan that can remove the moisture in its stead.
A fan that keeps the moisture in the room would not qualify in this way, so you can definitely claim a code violation.
Rip it out of the ceiling and call the landlord and tell them it fell out
You can buy some pretty good dehumidifiers for 200-300, but as other anons said, why invest your own money into a property you don’t even own.
Its supposed to be code to have the bathroom vented properly if it doesn't have a window. If they won't do anything about it you could call a code violation on them. Look up your county building codes if they give you trouble.
Construction gay here.
If the vent goes to nowhere it's out of code. And also kinda a health hazard because moisture needs to vent out of a room.
In all 50 states building code requires every bathroom to have a functional vent fan.
So you tell your apartment managers to fix it immediately or you're going to the local government to tell them about it. That's insane they didn't have an actual vent tube.
>In all 50 states building code requires every bathroom to have a functional vent fan.
or a window you can open.
Wrong. Window is irrelevant.
Code is every bathroom must have a vent fan.
Maybe some places but I can assure you that in my locale an openable window is up to code
I bet you think that it’s code that bedrooms must have closets.
Code varies by region. In my area, you can't call it a bedroom if it doesn't have a built in closet. That made house hunting a bit of a trip as many homes in my area are very old. Once I learned the trick I found all these listings online for 0/2 or 0/3 homes. Ended up buying a 0/2 and they through in 3 'bonus' rooms for free.
>That's insane they didn't have an actual vent tube.
I paid an inspector gay to check my home out before I bought it and the homosexual missed half the shit.
>one wrong type screw holding up the load center
Makes a 2 page report about it.
>every single breaker being 30A on a 15A circuit
No problem detected, carry on sirs.
The only real benefit of a property inspecton is that you can use it to back out of a property sale, even after you've signed the contract.
I would absolutely not rely on them to find actual issues. The only person who is going to truly care about your home is you.
Did you take it down or take it apart to actually verify there's NO venting? Wouldn't surprise me if one of the prior poors broke it out of self hate.
The average female has a better sense of DIY than a rentoid.
That's funny. I found out that the fan above my cooktop is the same way, it doesn't go anywhere, it just blows air. I never need to use it though so luckily in my case it's not a problem.
Those run the air through a filter.
This one doesn't, unless you mean the metal mesh one that primarily would just catch oil, stuff like smoke would go right through it. A place I lived before had an actual vent over the cooktop where air would be pushed out.
Every house I've ever lived in has this quirk. Just vents the steak into the space above. An absolutely bullshit setup that is pretty worthless.
Check to see if there is a vent knockout in the box that needs opening, then open it.
Put a small electric heater in your bathroom and run it on low for a few minutes before you turn on your shower.
In my parent's old house they didn't install a vent in their ensuite because they had a window that they could open. Turns out that it's a bit hard to open a window when winter hits. So during the winter they started using an electric heater. It defititely cut down on the amount of mist, but the moisture was still there.
What's above it? If it's the attic, you could just punch a hole and it wouldn't be as bad for the few months you have to be there.
I'm assuming there's no window in the bathroom. You could run a dehumidifier, but realistically the best thing to do would be to just use a floor fan to move air into your apartment when you shower, and leave the apartment windows open to bring in fresh air.
I lived in an apartment where the vent fan literally just exhausted straight into the ceiling insulation. The stupid builders never connected the roof vent to bathroom fan. I sent pictures to the landlord and offered to do the work myself for a "reasonable price". He agreed to pay me $150, which for a 20 minute job and $10 in materials, isn't too bad.
My bathroom doesn't have a fan or vent either, I left the state for 2 months and I came back to the moldiest toliets I've ever seen. Even the water storage is filled with mold. What do I do bros? Bleach will clean the bowl but it comes back in a couple days. Bleach does NOTHING to the mold in the water storage. Any ideas? Steel wool?
I run dehumidifiers in my house september-november, despite having proper vents and exhaust fans. I can recommend dehumidifiers, however, the effect won't be immediate and those effective ones with compressors can be noisy, so you don't want to run them when sleeping. Your bathroom will still get steamed.
either gtfo or purchase as many de-humidifiers as it takes to dry out the rooms. I would suggest opening a window but I'm going to assume that you would've already done this had your apartment actually had windows and not been a shithole. You need to solve this problem asap. I lived in an apartment with a bathroom that had rotting walls near the floor and rotting sub floor in the bathroom because of this. I had the apartment manager in my place at least once a week in the morning because there was a "leak". Don't worry guys I bought my house 3 years ago.