ECN Forum Forums Code Related Discussion Canadian Electrical Code Topics Bath Fan interlock electric baseboard heat

I have a person inquiring about his bath exhaust fan running all the time. he has electric base board heating. How are the contractors complying with the venting of moist air. there is just a single pole switch for the bath fan and he can not turn it off unless h turns off the breaker.

Apparntly he found the timer in a bedroom cloths closet far from the bathroom.

hire a real electrician to fix the problem. sounds to me like a carpenter or a plumber or maybe a drywaller did the wiring in that house. i know when i was in business they all wanted to be an electrician.

My guess is he found a dehumidstat and not a timer as an ex girlfriend's mother had electric baseboard heating and both bathrooms were on a central fan controlled by a dehumidstat in the main hallway.

If it was a timer it should have turned off the fan when it ran down and stayed off. With the zero to 100 markings for humidity I could see somebody confusing it with a timer.

The other question is why is the control located in a closet?

Hi Doug,

It looks like you are dealing with some weirdo electrical type out there in CYKA.

The CEC does not require an automatic humidity control for fans in bathrooms. (At least not in my latest 2008 version that I can find). There is a requirement, however, for a switch to control any bathroom fan that has to be easily accessible to the HO somewhere near the bathroom door but more than 1 metre from the tub however.

Maybe you have some pot smoking type trying out some brain addled ideas for humidity control.

Dave this is in the building code of BC

Hi Doug,

I guess the pot smoking types got ya there with the building code in BC. In the meantime, I still can't see (after a couple of hours of research) any modifications to the BC amendments to the CEC or the building code that requires an automatic fan startup for bathrooms. Can you quote or link the building code section that I'm missing? Maybe I can help from that one.

ON the other hand GO CANADA GO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

While the location of the dehumidistat might have been located by a Pot Smoking Hippy type it has been the control of humidity and the growth of mold that has caused the fun in the building code. Way back when we did not insulate the walls allowed enough air to pass through that we did not get a lot of sweat on the glass. with the addition of insulation and vapour barriers a lot of water vapour was getting trapped in the house and mold started growing. Leaky condo's exasperated the issues. The building code guys started to try and solve these wet interior walls with humidity controls and fans that ran all the time at a certain air flow to fans on timers that operated at higher air flows. Down here on the wet coast the normally high humidity along with cold temps was killing buildings from the inside. I had a superintendent build an R-2000 house here in Victoria and within a year the house was unlivable but the energy costs were low. He tore out a lot of drywall and added a heat exchanger because he had to add ventilation to control the mold. We are a lot further along in the whole building envelope situation but there is still some tweaking needed which is illustrated here.