Bathroom Exhaust Fan – Retrofit Design Replaces Existing Fan Without Attic Access, Quiet 1.0 Sones, 110 CFM, Powerful Ventilation with 4 Selectable CCT Light Settings for a Modern Look

Super nice fan / light. The fan is quiet and the light is bright. They are 3 light settings, the setting are done by flicking the light switch off/on in a certain pattern. As with all exhaust fans, the installation could be tricky, due to exhaust hose placement, access to the rafters, etc. But as far as the fan goes, I doubt if it will disappoint.

I shopped forever and I'm glad I ended up buying this one. Easily a one-person job. Unfortunately my old fan from the 80s was attached to my ceiling joists with the exhaust port pointing one way. This fan has the exhaust outlet facing the other way and you can't flip the housing (which I think is pretty standard these days). This required me to go into the attic and add an additional cross joist (just a 2x4) so it'd have something to mount this on. I went ahead and replaced the duct since I was up there. Glad I did since there were multiple old Robbin eggs in there. That's just a tip that if you haven't replace your duct for your bathroom fan, go ahead and do that. Also, check your duct size. Old ducts are three inch, this is four. You just need to buy a 5 dollar adapter, or you could upgrade your duct to four inch if you want (I didn't). Just something to keep an eye on. This thing is quiet. You literally have to be in the bathroom to hear it. Some people might prefer a louder fan to cover up the splashes. And it pulls plenty of air as it should. Good quality, nice light, easy to install if your house was built by normal people and not by some cooky Doc Brown type of character. But that's another story.

First let me say this fan is so so so quiet!! I went from a 3.5 sone Broan fan that was a smaller CFM to this larger Broan one. It is whisper quiet. You barely know it’s on. With the door closed you can’t hear it at all. My former fan you could hear it plainly through the solid wood door. The light is really very bright. It’s nice that you can switch the type of lighting. Mine is currently in the brightest setting. And it’s really brightened up that side of the bathroom. The shower area will be brighter now. Whether I will leave it that way or not I am not sure. I ordered this knowing some reviews said the clips were not a good design. And sometimes I will see things like that in a review and think well I didn’t have that problem wonder why they did? Let me tell you that is not the case with this! My fan box is perfectly flush with the drywall. The cover is not just a plastic cover with the grill holes. The light bar clicks into the middle of it. So there is a little bit of added weight there. There is one “clip” on each side of the cover. The clip is one curved piece of wire. The wire is looped into a circle in the center which is over a plastic piece on the cover. It can come off that piece, mine didn’t but the instructions said if it fell off to reattach it. From that center circle, the wire comes out about 3 inches on each side. There is a slight bend/curve to the wires and then at the end points they curled into a small circle. To attach the cover you are to squeeze the wire ends together and push them up into part of the plastic fan housing, right where the screw goes in to secure it to the metal box. The idea is to get the wires squeezed and slid up into the house where they will open up again and hold. But you squeeze them and once you get so close to the ceiling it’s very difficult to see if you have them in the right place. It’s hard to do them at the same time and also hard to do one side then the other for about the same reason. You can get one side in and then as you try to guide the other side in, you have to be careful the first side doesn’t pop out. Then once the cover gets closer to the ceiling it blocks your view of whether your in the right place with both ends of the wire. Once you finally (and to the point of exasperation) have the clips in the right place, you are to push the cover straight up flush to the ceiling. The clips are to open back out and hold the cover on. But they don’t do it well. I pushed my cover up and it fell off after two seconds. Which I was watching for from the other reviews. I did it two more times before it finally stayed. It is a MAJOR design flaw. Why they couldn’t make tabs like all the other Broan fan covers I have seen is beyond me. I am waiting to see if this fan clears the humidity out of the bathroom quickly. It’s why I upgraded to this fan. Our bathroom was at the very top end of the old fan’s range. It was not clearing humidity very well. I have the same old model in both of my other bathrooms which are a little smaller, and it works fine. But not in this slightly larger bathroom. It also gets more use. So I felt the upgrade was necessary. The verdict is out on that but I think it should considering the fans rating is for an even larger bathroom than this. The cover is nice and plain in its appearance. I don’t have any issue with that at all. The install was fairly easy. There was a template on the side of the box to use for cutting the drywall. The template was labeled with where the electric and duct connect so you could orient it correctly. It made cutting the hole larger easier for me. As far as it not having to go into the attic to retrofit this, I think maybe it’s possible but it would make it so much more difficult to do. We had to go into the attic to remove the old box there was no way around that. And putting in the new box, we needed to be in the attic to secure the box to the joist with screws. And attaching the vent tubing was not going to work for me because my vent tubing is insulated. There was no way for me to pull that down through hole like the directions say to do for retrofit. They suggest pulling the tubing through the hole on the metal box and attaching it to the black plastic piece, then slide that back out the hole and click the right side of the plastic into place and screw the left side in with a screw. That would not have worked at all for me. All in all it seems good for now. Whether the clips give me more trouble down the road and I will need to figure out a way to somehow keep it attached better, I don’t know. But I suspect I probably will.

So, overall, this was easy to install & was pretty self-explanatory. If you don’t know what you’re doing, then look up a YouTube video, it’s not hard. However, I will say that I have two small issues that could’ve been done better by Broan engineers & one that was an issue of assembly. 1) Make the wire harness plugs both easily removable for installation flexibility. Having only one removable w/ the other held in w/ the ground via a rivet & bracket-like setup is totally a shit design. 2) There are two nubs on the blower exhaust orifice that mates up w/ the exhaust adapter. It’s not clear why these are there because they prevent proper alignment & sealing of the blower & the adapter. I used duct tape to cover the gap & it works fine, but in retrospect I’d probably file off these nubs. I thought they may be to hold the blower in the exhaust adapter, but there isn’t enough room in the chassis to make that happen & the nubs are on the mating edge, not on the interior side of the port. 3) The wire springs to hold the face cover up were initially installed where they were rotated the wrong way & wouldn’t work. The instructions you get w/ the unit are very vague, pretty much just half-assed because they felt they had to include something. After rotating the springs they hold just fine. Aside from the small oversights by Broan, it’s a nice unit. This exhaust fan works twice as well & is at least twice as quiet or more than the $55 Broan models (Literally the lowest cost model at Home Depot) our builder installed in 2020. My wife says she sees it work, but can’t believe how efficient it works compared to its loudness or lack there of. Side note: The cheaper model this fan replaced use a 3” to 4” step-up adapter, meaning the blower exhaust was 3” & the exhaust pipe is 4”. This cheaper model having that reducer in there causes a ton of unnecessary noise due to turbulence, so get a exhaust fan that matches your pipe size, which is typically 4”, maybe 6” if you have a large bathroom. 1 sonne(s) or less is whisper quiet & totally worth it if you’re not trying to cover up sounds you make while on the toilet.

Very quiet. Definitely an improvement. LED light is very bright although do not see much difference in the four settings.

Missing pieces

Like the low noise. Was CSA compliant so could be installed by our electrician. The light is extremely bright though. Overall, a great choice for a water closet, small powder room.

A little louder than expected, and as others mention the grill makes the fan fairly inefficient.

Good quality and easy to install, in my case was a retrofit so I had to enlarge the old opening and that was it.

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