Ensuite/Bathroom Improvements
There is a longish story of evolution in our ensuite (bathroom). There’s a little bit of an echo in here because there is no external opening to this room. You can see behind me that we can see straight out the back, but that’s because there’s a glass wall on the other side of the shower enclosure. So it looks very nice, but the problem was that it was always damp in here. We’ve progressed over time, and done various things to try and address that dampness, and there was also the tendency towards mould on the ceiling.
The original fan was choked with dust and it wasn’t really a great fan, so we replaced it. But replacing it didn’t really make a lot of difference. As we used to accidentally leave the fan on for a long time, we put a pneumatic push button on the fan. We would push the button and it would run the fan just for a number of minutes rather than all day long. That kind of helped a little bit – but not very much really.
So the next thing that we did is we got an electric towel rail. We figured, “Well, we’ve got damp towels all day long. That’s not really good, so let’s get an electric towel rail and have nice warm and dry towels.” It is connected to a timer, so it comes on in the morning and dries the towels, and a little bit at night. Again, it helped a little bit, and we did have nice, toasty, warm towels, which is great but still not really fantastic. We did install the Solaventi, which did help a lot. And finally, the thing that really made a really big difference is that we fitted on top of our shower our own version of Showerdome. I’m a big fan of the Showerdome product, and I would have bought the real McCoy if our shower had been a standard size, but it’s not.
So what we’ve done is made our own effective shower dome, making the shower a booth rather than just an enclosure. Having done that, there actually is almost never a reason to run the exhaust fan, because all the steam from the shower actually condenses on the glass in the shower, and none of it comes in the room at all. Our shower’s big enough, that you can towel dry in there in a nice, warm space rather than out here, so it actually has worked fantastically well. After showering, we leave the shower door open, and the Solarventi actually just dries out the shower during the day, so it makes everything dry. And there certainly is no tendency towards any mould issue here at all anymore
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