Extractor fans in both the kitchen and bathroom are ideal for keeping the air around you clean, reducing the risk of disease and illness. After cooking a meal, and indeed with plates and cutlery waiting for washing, there are all sorts of potential bugs and germs hanging around in the air – this is one area where extractor fans excel.

The other is keeping the air at a reasonable and comfortable temperature. After a hot bath, or cooking a roast dinner, the air temperature is significantly higher than previously. To keep a good level of moisture in the air, and for you to remain comfortable, an extractor fan will therefore remove a lot of that hot air, to keep temperature low, ensuring the air is clean and fresh.

However with bathroom and kitchen extractor fans, you might think they both do the job as good as one another – this is not the case. There are explicit guidelines regarding usage and safety for each to comply to. To be saleable, an extractor fan needs to comply to the safety guidelines set out by industry standards, as well as being above a certain level of quality – an extractor fan has to be able to remove a certain amount of air from the room in a given time in order to qualify to go on sale.

So what are the differences between an extractor fan in the kitchen or in the bathroom? Simple really, but a bathroom extractor fan must be safe for use in the bathroom environment where contact with water is unlikely, but entirely possible. Therefore for the bathroom, fans must be low power and well covered. The cover ensures good protection from contact with water, while the low power makes sure that if water contact ever occurs, it’s unlikely to cause injury.

In comparison, a fan installed in a kitchen is totally different. While in the bathroom, safety is paramount, the kitchen has much different considerations. Here, there are of course safety regulations, but with the fan likely to be out of reach, away from contact with water, they are much less strict. Here almost the only concern is the amount of air which can be shifted in a second by the fan. Provided the fan is capable of removing 15 litres of air per second from the room, the fan will be within the governing regulations, and perfect for use in the kitchen – much different to the low power, safety-conscious bathroom alternatives.