Delta Breez: Quiet, Energy-Efficient  Bathroom Fans

Ok, it's been a few weeks since Greenbuild, yet we are still finding interesting products from the show. If you've ever been on the expo hall floor, you know how chaotic it can be. It's easy to miss products tucked among the various booths, lose coworkers among the throngs of people, or in my case, entirely forget that you visited a booth. So when I opened my notepad recently and out fell a small pamphlet describing the Delta Breez bathroom fan, I was pleasantly surprised.

Extremely low-sone fans (1.0 sone is about as loud as a new refrigerator) have been around for years; they're necessary for controlling humidity and providing local ventilation, of course, and they can be used as the sole means of external ventilation in very tight, energy-efficient homes. (BuildingGreen first wrote about Panasonic’s WhisperLite fan back in 1997.) But there's a new player in the bathroom fan industry, Delta Products, a division of Delta Electronics (no relation to Delta Faucet). They only started selling bathroom fans in 2010, but they're now offering eight HVI- (Home Ventilation Institute) and Energy Star-certified models, with more on the way in 2011.