Ventilation Trouble

[booga119]

Ok, I've had my ventilation set up for about a month now and everything's been working great. I'm using a squirrel cage fan, and randomly it started giving me weird squeeking whining noises. The next day it wouldn't run at all. There was still power going to it, but the fan itself wouldn't move. I took it apart and oiled it and it was working again. It's a day later and I'm back to the annoying noises.

Has anyone else had issues like these before? Is there some maintenance I'm supposed to be doing on the fan? I really don't want to get a new fan since I just got it a month ago.

[Ro]

seems like you might have gotten a lemon, i cant think of why it would stop working.
ro

[Abacus Beads]

Is it installed so the fan part is level? Or perhaps grease would work better than oil
Liz R

[RSimmons]

If the rotor (the actual fan blades) isn't balanced then you'll wear out the bearings pretty quickly. The noises you've heard are the bearings burning out. Either your fan was badly out of balance or you got a bad set of bearings from the start.

Robert

[booga119]

is it possible to replace the bearings if that's the problem? i'm sorry if that's a dumb question. i'm not good at mechanical things like this.

[RSimmons]

Many squirrel cage type blowers are actually separate motor and fan units. The motor on mine attaches to the blower housing by 3 bolts. You might try taking the motor off and looking at both the bearings of the fan and the motor shaft to see if you can detect excess wear on them. It all depends on the motor, some have replaceable bearings and some are cheaper to replace the whole motor. You might be able to solve the whole problem by being sure that the fan is running true and not wobbling at all. Your description of the problem does sound to me like a bearing surface somewhere in the system is wearing unevenly (and pretty quickly).

Which blower unit do you have?

Robert