my home is about 35+yrs old and this Bathroom Exhaust Vent Fan Motor fit perfect to replace the
old ones .......4-1/2 stars....for this product...

I have a 40 year old house with 40 year old bath fans. One of them was labeled "Air-o-matic" with a model number 605. It had gotten horrendously scratchy and loud over the years, to the point that it was a little scary because it wasn't clear to me what could even be making the noises it was making. This fan motor is obviously out of production, and the fan assembly/housing itself is totally different from any of the modern ones I've seen, so buying a whole fan kit and just replacing the inner part wouldn't work. (For newer fans that need replacing, you don't even need to unscrew the old motor. You can just clip in the new motor and bracket, since fan housings now are basically standard.) I had almost resigned myself to replacing the entire housing, which is a big pain in the butt if you're not an electrician or handyman.

But then I found this. I actually found a slightly different model somewhere else that another reviewer had mentioned worked as a replacement for his Air-o-matic, but I realized pretty quickly that all of these replacement motors look more or less the same, and have basically the same shape as my Air-o-matic. I also realized that my fan mounting bracket actually has one screw hole that's elongated to give a little leeway for mounting replacement motors with slightly different screw placement, so I just took a chance on this.

I had read that I needed to convert this from CCW to CW, which made me a little nervous, but it was very easy to unscrew the two pieces from the top and just swap them around - that's all it takes. Then I just screwed it into my existing mounting bracket, plugged it in and boom - working fan! I tested the airflow with a piece of tissue paper just to make sure it was blowing out with the orientation I set, and it was.

It turned out to be very easy to install, and it sounds like a new fan (because it is). It's maybe not the *best* motor, and it's definitely not silent, but that's ok because I don't want silence when I'm doing my business in the bathroom. I like to know the fan is on and I want other people to hear it too. So there is some normal fan noise, which is good, and there's also just a tinge of low-frequency motor noise or vibration. My other bath fan, which seems like a replacement already (I am not the original owner of the house) has this same sound so I think it's normal. It's barely noticeable and I probably only even hear it because the whole point of me doing this was to fix a noisy fan, so I'm listening for it. In any case, it's a massive improvement over what was there before.

One thing is that this is a 50cfm fan - and most of the "universal" fans and motors I've seen are. It's perfectly fine for small bathrooms but I'll bet there are even some larger bathrooms out there that this would not be enough for. Most computer case fans move significantly more air than that. (In fact, not really sure why we don't just use those fans for bathrooms - they're smaller, cheaper, and easy to replace.) It definitely would not be enough for something like a garage, unless you have more than one.

In my case, though, I'm using this in a bathroom that's about 4x10. It's plenty enough for that. I realized after installing it that my old fan wasn't really doing much at all; I would get steamed up mirrors when taking a shower and would have to almost immediately open the bathroom door to keep from having that "sticky" post-shower feeling (where you feel like you need a shower right after taking one), even with the fan on. Not any longer. My bathroom is totally dry after taking a shower now.

Hopefully this is helpful to someone out there with an old fan you don't know how to replace. Take the vent cover off and look at your fan motor. If it looks at all similar to this, you can probably replace it with this motor. Unplug your fan and unscrew the mounting bracket and look at the shaft length and fan diameter as well. You can take some exact measurements but I just took a chance. You can always cut the shaft if you need to as well. For me, the whole thing was just a drop-in replacement once I changed the orientation.

I was a little confused at first, but realized to make it fit in my fan housing, I needed to remove the screws and swap the bearings to the opposite sides. Works great!

The shaft was too long and I had to cut the shaft down a quarter of an inch

Fits good, easy to install