AiDot OREiN Bathroom Exhaust Fan Review: Everything You Didn't Know You Needed In A Bath Fan
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Sometimes you glance at a product and think — without really thinking too much — that you will probably find it unnecessary, over the top, or extravagant. And then, after a little experience with it, and some real thinking time, you find that it's just about perfect. This often happens with luxury items, high-end products, and super-specialized goods, and it might very well happen to you with the OREiN OL005 bathroom exhaust fan with Bluetooth speaker, currently 4.4 stars and $229.99 at Amazon.
OREiN is a brand of AiDot, a maker of smart home devices mostly united by a mobile app platform, though the OL005 isn't app controlled. This was a good decision; imagine giving your guests instructions for turning on the bathroom fan with an app. Still, a minimalist, technophobe, or contrarian might find this fan — with its RGB LEDs, user-selectable light color temperatures, night light, Bluetooth speaker, and two powerful speeds of air movement — a bit much.
Of course, if you're not a minimalist, technophobe, or contrarian, you might find that you can't remember how you lived without mood lighting, a faint song, and a quiet fan that doesn't interfere with your bath. After all, these aren't bad ideas. Properly executed, they're positively great ideas. So, to see if the OREiN OL005 executes them properly and lives up to its potential, we put it through its paces and a bit of simple testing.
Installation and setup
Installing the OL005 turned out to be a somewhat fraught process, mostly because we struggled to find the right place to install it and not due to any particular difficulty with the actual installation. This is a ceiling-mount-only device that's easiest to install in an attic for a bathroom on the floor below, so we set out in search of a bathroom that fit the bill. We found one in need of a new exhaust fan in a friend's Airbnb cottage. The bathroom actually has two exhaust fans ... one above the toilet and one in the shower stall that was making a hideous racket. The attic's floor joists were framed with 2x8 lumber (which is actually 1 ½ inches by 7 ½ inches), and the rather large OL005 is a full 8 inches tall. Since both bathroom fans were partly covered in the attic by a built-in platform, the OL005 was a half-inch too tall for the space. In an attic with no floor over the fans, this wouldn't have been a problem.
Instead, we installed it in an outbuilding used as a home recording studio and in which a lot of soldering goes on — a task that will make one very grateful for an exhaust fan. We used the included flex bracket which is designed to simplify installation, and it worked brilliantly. The fan's housing sits securely on the rails, held in place by 8 tabs that bend into place. Installation took around 45 minutes.
The fan as a... fan
We did most of our tests before the installation. The most important of these were meant to tell us how well the OL005 replaced air, though bathroom exhaust fans have several benefits. We measured the air flow, the time it takes for the fan to return a steamy bathroom to normal humidity, and its loudness. The OL005 has settings for 110 cubic feet per minute (CFM) and 160 CFM, and we measured both, with and without an improvised flow hood. On the 110 CFM setting, the fan produced 108.22 CFM ... very close, and well within our vane anemometer's margin of error. On the 160 CFM setting, the fan consistently moved air at between 185 and 209 CFM ... very good indeed. The 160 CFM setting was only slightly louder, 59 db (decibels) versus 56 db at 110 CFM, between the loudness of a residential refrigerator and a business office. For comparison, we measured an installed 70 CFM Broan exhaust fan at 69 db.
A quiet fan is great, but the first job of any bathroom exhaust fan is removing humidity from the room after a shower. We rigged the OL005 to pull air from a bathroom and tested to see how long it would take to return the room to its initial humidity levels after a hot shower. A steamy shower quickly took the room from 49% to 95% humidity. Running the fan for 15 minutes (at 160 CFM) reduced the room's humidity to 46%.
The OL005 as a Bluetooth speaker
Of course, another reason to have a quiet exhaust fan is so you can listen to some tunes while you relax in the tub, which brings us to the OL005's built-in Bluetooth speaker. The speaker paired with a phone and laptop painlessly, which is not always a given with Bluetooth devices, and it stayed connected no matter where the phone was positioned in the room. It played clearly and without distortion at its maximum volume level, which produced a max of 91.2 decibels for the album we tested with. The quality was comparable to a moderately priced TV ... a little more than good, but not great. However, it was decidedly better than we expected, given the size of the roughly 4-inch speaker.
We originally planned to test the speaker's frequency response accuracy, but couldn't put our hands on a measurement microphone in time. So, as an experiment, we recorded the OL005, a studio monitor, and a PA speaker all playing the same audio and compared the recordings, including a quick look at a spectrum analyzer. There were no surprises. The OL005 lacked a little range, especially on the low end, but overall performed admirably.
The OL005 as various kinds of lighting
For parents (and spouses) of video gamers, just the mention of "RGB" conjures up images of garish colors chasing themselves around the chassis or an overpriced computer, and we were a little worried we'd get these kinds of LED pyrotechnics with the OL005. Instead, its RGB functionality was limited in a good way. You have 7 colors to choose from, and at a glance they might seem to flirt with garish as well. But in practice, the colored light actually creates a subtle overtone in the room, which you might vary by mood or activity. It's a nice effect. RGB Music Sync mode causes the colors to alternate in time with the music being played, or at least with the drums, but it never gets obnoxious. Dubstep aficionados might find it a little lacking in drama, but for most people the lighting transitions will be soothing.
There are two other lighting modes offered up by the OL005, in addition to RGB: a 2700K, 200-lumen night light; and an overhead light that can be adjusted to one of three brightness levels (30, 70, and 100% of the claimed 1500 lumens) and one of three color temperatures (2700K, 4000K, and 6500K) depending on your mood and preference. All of the lighting functions are accessed via the remote control, which is unusually clear and easy-to-use given that it controls three different functions (light, sound, and fan), which could easily have become confusing.
Conclusion and recommendations
We looked at the OREiN OL005 from just about every angle we could think of, and it met our expectations at every twist and turn. It's well-made and stylish, and offers the right implementation of the right features for a primary bathroom that occasionally gets used as a spa. The remote is a work of art and it seamlessly controls fan, music, and lighting options that could easily have gotten out of hand, but don't. The choices of brightness, color temperature, and RGB colors all accomplish their goals without the confusing complexity we've seen in some smart home lighting options. The Bluetooth functionality is simple and well-executed; you can control volume and navigate through a playlist, and that's plenty. And, most importantly, the high-volume exhaust fan clears the room in no time and keeps you from having to worry about mold and other problems that tag along with a bathroom's humidity.
We do wish it had been a half-inch shorter, so as to be compatible with covered 2x8 framing. And it's tempting to ask for additional features like a fan timer and automatic humidity sensing. But before you know it, you'd be turning a simple pleasure into an array of options that would irritate your family and bewilder your guests. The OREiN OL005 is about as well-executed as it could have been, and beyond that half-inch, we wouldn't change a thing. All told, we'd give it a strong 9 out of 10. With the current coupon and discount code orein111, you can pick up the OL005 for $189.99.