Do bathroom exhaust fans REALLY work?

Open a window , i never use bathroom fan .

You’re probably right. They’re really just to mask the noise.

I think they do. It’s certainly better than not having one. They’re also useful in getting rid of all that steam when you take a shower. Some are better than others, though. They’re always advertising “super quiet” ones, but the quieter they are, the less effective in most cases. My grandparents have a really old ‘50s bathroom fan; it’s way more powerful than most you can find today and it isn’t quiet, that’s for sure.

They certainly move air from inside the room to outside the room, but if you look at a hardware catalog for bathroom fans, you will see a wide range of specifications. A high enough CFS rating is a good sign that one may work.

I have one. It does work. Not as great as a window would.

They are great for removing moisture from the air after a shower (their intended purpose I thought) as they clearly suck at sucking away errant odors.

A fan can only pull air out of a room as fast as new air can come in to replace it. If the door and window are shut, the fan will have a very hard time pulling any air out. Try opening the window slightly (if it’s not too cold out) when you run the fan. Or leave the door ajar and the fan running when you leave the room.

For me, yes. For my husband, absolutely not!

They work great for secretly smoking as a teenager.

As @Kayak8 implied, the purpose of the fans is to remove moist air not smell. They do that quite well. Consider getting a deoderizer for the other.

Well, mine does :P

Maybe yours has got stuff in the vent?

In an apartment they work FINE! You can hear every word said by the people upstairs!!

In my apartment the bathroom has a closet and, for reasons that escape me, the vent fan is in that closet.

i always wonder where the smell goes….

“Stink vents” are typically on the roof of homes to let odors out, but the bathroom vents are often just set up to disperse humidity, although they can be vented outdoors to also let odors from the bathroom out of your house.

to move the air, a window open and the fan on is ideal.
In a perfect world, my wife wouldn’t make the soup that requires it.

In a perfect world, bathroom exhaust fans work well to remove moisture and those inevitable organic odors from the room and from the house. However, some builders of older houses vented such fans into the attic rather than to the outside, and a lot of vent fans are the lowest-cost, “builder” fans that can barely move any air. Most houses have enough air leaks that having an open window nearby isn’t necessary, but if you are in a brand-new, super air-tight, energy-saving house, that could be a problem.

I much prefer there to be both an exhaust fan and an openable window in our bathrooms, but cost and lack of common sense on the part of builders has meant that in my first house I had to argue with the builder (and pay extra) to get both in each bathroom, and in my second house, one bathroom has no window at all while the other two have windows that don’t open, but all (fortunately) have exhaust fans that really do get the moisture and the odors out of the room and through the roof.

BTW a lot of those “stink vents” are necessary to make sure your toilets and drains work. They aren’t really for letting odors out.

Also, if you do have a bathroom fan that vents to the attic, make sure to check that the moisture isn’t building up and causing other, serious problems with rot.

It depends 100% on the way your building was built.

My apartment is relatively new. Each of the bathroom fans has a direct channel to the outside world. I can guarantee you that they work excellently.

However, I have lived in a house where the fan simply pushed the air into the attic… good luck getting the smell out!