Exhaust fan cleaning in Mesa

What an exhaust fan is actually for

It is there for humidity, not odor.

A bathroom fan exists to pull humid air out of the room and put it outside before it condenses on cold surfaces. Working properly, a mirror clears reasonably fast after a shower and the room dries out. Not working, that moisture stays in the room and goes into the paint, the drywall and eventually the ceiling.

The symptoms arrive slowly enough that people adapt to them. Paint peeling near the shower. A ceiling that never quite dries. Grout discoloring faster than it should. Each of those is a ventilation problem being blamed on something else.

Two checks you can do right now

The paper test

Turn the fan on and hold a single square of toilet paper flat against the grille. A working fan holds it there without you touching it. If it drops, the fan is not moving enough air, and the usual reason is a housing packed with years of lint and dust.

Look at the grille

Take a flashlight and look up through the slots. Furred gray edges mean accumulated buildup, and what you can see is a fraction of what is in the housing above it.

What is actually in there

More than people expect, and not the same material as a duct system.

Lint and fabric fiber from towels, which is the bulk of it. Skin cells and hair. Dust pulled up from the room. In a laundry room fan, the same again with more fiber.

Every bit of it compacts into the cavity surrounding the motor and the blades. The more that collects, the less air the fan shifts while drawing the same current, which explains why a long-neglected fan manages to be both noisy and useless simultaneously.

Why it matters in Mesa specifically

Two local reasons.

Monsoon humidity. For a couple of months the outside air is genuinely humid, and a fan that barely copes in April cannot cope in August. That is when the paint problems show up.

Old housing. Mesa's median home was built in 1989, and a thirty-five year old bathroom fan that has never been opened is doing very little. In the older parts of the city the fan is frequently original to the house.

Where it is worth doing

• Every bathroom fan in a house where nobody has ever done it
• Laundry room fans, which take more fiber than a bathroom does
• Any fan that has got noticeably louder over the years
• Any fan that fails the paper test
• Bathrooms where the paint or ceiling shows moisture damage

What cleaning will not fix

If the motor is failing, whining, running hot or stopping intermittently, cleaning will not extend its life much. That is a replacement and an electrical job.

If the fan is undersized for the room, cleaning restores the performance it was always going to have, which may still not be enough.

And if the fan vents into the attic rather than outside, which happens more than it should in older Mesa housing, cleaning it means it more efficiently pumps moist air into your roof space. You will be told if that is what we find, because it is a genuine problem worth fixing properly.

Doing it with the ducts

This is how it makes sense to purchase. Fifty dollars a fan does not justify sending a truck out on its own, and a standalone visit for one or two fans would run into the minimum anyway.

Added to a duct cleaning it costs nothing extra in travel and takes very little additional time. Most houses have two or three, so it is $100 to $150 on top of a job already happening.

Questions