Apologies if this has been done (to death) previously…
I’m looking at putting in a powerful 4″ extract fan in the bathroom, the type that can pick a small dog up off the floor. There is a big price difference between a Manrose at £72 and a Vent-Axia at £123, and I’m wondering if the difference is just buying the Vent-Axia name.
Does anybody have any experience of installing them, or any insights into their reliability?
As the bathroom is being completely redone I want to get it right first time, but don’t want to spend needlessly.
I await your pearls of wisdom.
CD

We have a 4″ Vent Axia in our bathroom. When we moved in the damp and humidity used to create small areas of mould around the window on the walls and ceiling. We redid the bathroom treated the mould and had the fan fitted, plus connected to a humidity sensor in the pull switch. This was around 6 years ago, it has totally cured the problem, works really well and shuts itself off when the humidity gets down to a certain level. It’s pretty powerful and every time I go into someone else bathroom it makes me realise how asthmatic most other extractor fans are.

We had an electrician fit it and the fan itself has been totally reliable although I think the humidity sensor is starting to be less sensitive, but there is the manual over-ride option too so havent worried too much.

Bookmarks thread….. 🙄

What does ‘bookmarks thread’ mean?

browser bookmark so he can come back to it for answers later on as presumably he has the same problem.

oh and to answer…got a decent 4″ (not sure on the make) fan in the flat after messing around with crappy ones for years. It is always on at a low level but perks up when the light is on and stays fast for a duration afterwards.

Been 3 years since I re-did the bathroom and had a couple living there and not a spot of mould in a basement flat bathroom with no windows.

If I was doing it again I would probably go with a centrifugal type as they look less messy due to dust uptake and should be a bit higher performance. Bulky though.

You can also get inline fans to place in the duct if you have access and want a neater finish with less noise directly in the room.

My choice would be to fit a loft mounted inline fan, rather than one that’s directly mounted in the bathroom ceiling. You can have a more powerful fan (or 2 if you like) without having the noise directly in the bathroom.

Can hardly hear ours at all when its on.

If you can an in-line Vent Axia with a humidity sensor. Works well for a long time, worth the extra IME.

Some good advice here. Thanks all.
I was looking at an in-line duct fan but had not thought of an in-line humidity sensor. I’m Googling it now. The fan will go in the loft and vent out through the soffits.
I know the mantra “buy cheap buy twice” is usually true, but I don’t want to pay unnecessarily for an equivalent product. I’m not fussed about having a ‘posh’ named fan in the loft as the bats will not be impressed, and nothing/no-one else is up there.
As long as it works, and is reliable and discrete. That’s all I want.

I’ve got an aventa av100T which works really well in our bathroom, although if I was doing it again I’d probably go for the 5″ version as it pulls a lot more air. The Aventa ones are cheaper than the better known brands for some reason, but it seems to work perfectly well.

Link to the AV100T, here:

http://www.fastlec.co.uk/airflow-aventa-av100t-timer-fan-100mm-mixed-flow-2-speed

I see there have been a few threads on this subject recently. I have just bought (from ebay as it was cheap’ish) a Vent Axia 4″ wall mount jobbie with a humidistat that has a constant run which increases when it senses humidity (obviously), the difference in the air in the small downstairs extra bathroom is amazing, but I can’t help but worry that as the thing is constantly extracting air for which I have paid to heat up I’m then paying more through way of heating bills let alone the small cost of the continually running fan, am I wrong?

Cheers.

Edit, here is the link to the ebay one for £60 & here it is on VA’s site for £228.