Bathroom Ventilation Tips

 

JUDY: OK, I have a downstairs basement bathroom that I’m redoing and it had a vent in the wall that went into the furnace room. And somebody told me that – and now I want to move the vent into the ceiling and somebody told me that it shouldn’t go into the furnace room; that it should go up through the floor of the bathroom upstairs and out the roof.

TOM: OK, this is – now this is the vent for the plumbing or the vent for the fan; the vent fan?

JUDY: The vent fan.

TOM: OK. Well, the vent fan should vent to the outside. It shouldn’t vent to another room in the basement or upstairs or anywhere else. Now, if it’s a basement bathroom, the shortest distance between the bathroom and the outside is where you want to go and probably the easiest way to do that is to not worry about running it all the way up into the attic space but just run the duct hose for the vent in between the floor joists and take it out the exterior wall at the level of the floor structure.

JUDY: OK.

TOM: And that’s a lot easier than worrying about taking it up and out. Plus, you know, a fan for the bathroom doesn’t have that much power. It doesn’t blow that many cubic feet per minute. And if you try to push that air up two stories …

LESLIE: It won’t make it.

TOM: … it’s not as effective.

JUDY: Alright, thank you very much.

TOM: You’re welcome, Judy. Good luck with that project. Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.