My kitchen and bathroom both suffer from an extreme case of windowlessness. No natural light ever pierces these dark recesses of my flat, neither does the soft spring breeze ever waft gently through their becalmed atmosphere. Both rooms therefore have an extractor fan fitted, in compliance with official building regulations. And I have both extractor fans permanently switched off. Tell me, is this wrong?
Every year my landlord sends round the "gas safety check" man, while I'm out, to check whether my boiler is about to kill me. Four years ago this workman took it upon himself to fit a new extractor fan in my kitchen, replacing the original which had stopped working. I discovered this when I returned home, switched on the kitchen light and heard a loud whirring above my head. I switched off the kitchen light but the whirring continued. And continued. And continued to continue. Half an hour later it was still continuing, and only after 45 minutes did it finally splutter out. Hmm, I thought, this can't be right. So I experimented again, and again the automatic suction drone took 45 minutes to terminate. So I switched off the extractor fan and its protracted delay timer, and have continued to use my kitchen in an unventilated manner ever since.
I don't want the racket of an extractor fan forever interrupting my peace and quiet. I don't want a low buzzing noise burbling away beneath every CD or mp3 I play. I don't want to waste money on 44 pointless minutes of electricity every time I walk out of my kitchen. I don't want to lie in the bath straining to hear the radio above the spinning fan grinding away above my head. And I don't want to lie awake in bed every night wishing I hadn't popped into the kitchen just before bedtime and waiting for the hurricane to cease. I don't have a hot and steamy flat, I don't suffer from condensation and my morning bath is never plagued by clouds of rampant moisture. So both extractor fans stay firmly out of action*. * unless I have something bubbling ferociously on the stove, in which case I switch the fan on and off manually.
This week the "gas safety check" man came round again. Pre-warned, I left him a note complaining that the extractor fan in the kitchen droned on for far too long, and could he shorten its automatically-determined duration. Mistake. I returned home, switched on the light in the kitchen and was greeted again by the sound of my extractor nemesis. At the bottom of my note the engineer had scribbled a sarky reply in semi-legible block capitals. "THE VENT NEEDS TO BE LEFT ON". And on my official gas safety certificate, under the heading Give Details Of Any Faults, he'd written "LEAVE THE VENT ON". Patronising jobsworth bastard. I switched the vent off again, permanently, and continued with my unextracted ways. Tell me, was I wrong?
I cannot work out why it's apparently so essential to have a functioning automatic light-switch-based extractor fan with a 45 minute time delay in my kitchen. OK, so I have a gas boiler in there, but its operation is in no way connected to whether I've turned my kitchen light on or not. If my boiler decides to leak and render me unconscious overnight, no illumination-related vent will save my life. As for my gas oven, admittedly I tend never to use it in the dark. But 95% of the time I go into the kitchen I'm not using anything gas-operated at all. Why do I need the fan running every single bloody time I fancy a slice of toast or a bowl of cereal or a glass of water. I wouldn't mind quite so much if it switched off after half a minute, but three quarters of an hour is just taking the piss. I'm not wrong. Am I?
