Aérateur II

Ventum habemus. After bruised fingers, drops of copious almost cinematic sweat stinging in the eyes, and a fair bit of cursing (English expletives seemed appropriate to the locus), the aérateur has been installed, and made to function concurrently with the lighting. The trouble was that the lighting wiring was on one side of the room and the vent for the extractor was on the other.

The smallest room didn't seem very small when I had to run cabling around the tops of walls almost inaccessible to a hammer, which was needed to anchor the wire holding clips. The fan itself had to be embedded in a shelf, with an exact 100mm circle to cut out. Perfect circles are not easy to cut, particularly without a padsaw or circle cutter. I ended up drilling scores of holes, and then cutting between them with a chisel. The said shelf then needed putting up, in exact alignment with the pre-existent but hopelessly mis-positioned metal vent tubing, which had to be recut in situ. Nice job when it is next to the ceiling, in a dark corner, with insufficient room to work a saw. To cap it all, the walls were made of undrillable hollow brick (a kind of thick tile sandwich), so the supports for the shelf needed a different solution to the normal screws and wallplugs. I ended up paying through the nose for a specialist glue which will hold almost anything to anything.

Still, it works, when the lightswitch is flicked on, and it stops when the light is put out. Whether it will deal effectively with the aromatic aftermath of a cassoulet is something only time will tell.