When Karla and I first moved into this house, one little item caught my attention. The vent fan in the bathroom had a spring-wound timer switch that you could use to keep the fan on for up to an hour at a time. Even the home inspector that we used commented on how those were the best things for keeping excess moisture from building up in the bathroom.
Unfortunately, about a year later, the spring mechanism started to stick. And so my quest for the perfect Timer Switch began.
The first thing I tried, was replace the original switch with another one exactly like the first (the switch on the right). Once again, this worked great - for about six months. Then the spring started to stick again, and the fan would stay on all day long.
The frustrating part was, no matter where I looked, I couldn't find anyplace that offered a different brand of timer switch. Every place had the same one. I wasn't about to get the same one 3 times.
Then one day I found a new style at Home Depot (pictured on the left above). This one even had a new feature - you could turn it to the left for a "hold" position to keep it on indefinitely. Unfortunately, this timer proved FAR worse than the first one. After only two weeks the timer started to sputter and turn off mid-way through it's cycle.
So far I had two crappy timer switches. One would quit and leave the fan on, the other would quit and turn the fan off. I'll call these the Bad, and the Ugly (pictured above).
Luckily for me, I finally found the "Good" switch at SmartHome.com (Shown above). It was a digital timer with 4 preset durations - 60, 30, 20, and 10 minutes. A red LED to the left of the buttons shows how much time is left as the timer counts down.
For example, if you press the 30 minute button, it will shine red until it gets down to 20 minutes, then the 20 minute LED will light up (See the picture to the left). This in turn counts down to the 10 minute LED and then the fan turns off.
With no spring to wear out, I'm hoping this solution will be a little more permanent.
