What A Difference A Pop Lock Makes!

Fan With Screws

Ventilation fans are great! They use far less power than an Air Conditioner and can provide a beautifully cool
breeze. Nowadays, airborne pollutants; dust pollen, bugs(!) and the like come straight in through these things. A screen helps a great deal, but have been pretty annoying to clean. Either you got up on the roof with a vacuum or removed the MANY screws holding the screen onto the fan assembly. Not any more! Well, at least for long time fantastic fan (and clones) users. My old vent fans had those pesky screws, but the manufacturer makes a kit to swap from screws to push in tabs!
Yay! Not that I'm a huge fan of cleaning, mind you, but it's a good practice to get in to. Especially if you are breathing the bad stuff in.


Installing these couldn't be much easier. Just get your handy dandy philips head screw driver and remove all the screws holding your old (and likely dirty) round screen cover off. Take the new version out of the box (it contains two of them), and "pop" it on. Be CAREFUL you have to line it all up and gently press them in. Why? How do I know it's a bad thing to force the little tabs in?

You guessed it, while installing I snapped one of the little buggers off. I wasn't really in a rush or anything, just thought they needed a little "help" to fit. I was wrong.

Busted Off Tab

Rushing is never a good thing. Great way to make mistakes though. I highly recommend it for adding extra angst to your life.

You could still use the screen with one missing tab, but I'd probably be thinking about it for most of the trip! I decided to use the extra in the box.

To be honest, when I replaced the other (bedroom) fan/vent, that one came with the removable screen. That was how I knew they existed. So I had a spare.

The Tabs!

These tabs REALLY grab hold of the edge of the opening. I am being very careful when I remove them for my (much more frequent) cleanings. I have to tell you, they get pretty nasty, pretty quickly. What are we spewing into the atmosphere anyway? No surprise I get dark streaks from my roof! Better outside the RV than in our lungs!

Once finished, you find that since its so much easier to do, you'll clean them more frequently. Believe it or not, the inside of my RV has been much less dusty. Especially those lightweight "floaty" dust bunnies that hide near the hardwood floors.

Installed.

Another simple way to make your life easier and healthier that doesn't cost much at all.

If you don't have some kind of a powered vent I highly recommend one. I prefer boondocking and use solar charging almost exclusively for power, so any way I can cool the interior without using too much power is a beautiful thing.

Since I have two powered vents, I usually leave one on exhaust (pulling air out of the RV) and one on intake. This way you always have a nice breeze that exchanges the air inside so it doesn't get "stale." Try it, you'll like it.

To clean them, I remove the screen, blow it clean with some compressed air then rinse it in light soapy water in the sink. You wouldn't believe how dirty the water gets. Then a clean water rinse, air dry and re-install. Easy!

The Fantastic Fan brand that I have installed isn't the only one available. That brand used to get rave reviews for customer service and would replace any part, regardless of age, for free. They used their advertising and marketing budget on these replacements to build positive word of mouth. A good idea! They were recently bought up by Atwood....we'll see how it goes.

Be Seeing You...Down The Road,

Rich "The Wanderman"
www.thewanderman.com