Ask a homeowner what they dislike about their bathroom fan and the answer is almost always the noise. Ask an engineer and the answer is the same, with a reason attached. The motor is mounted in the ceiling of a small, hard surfaced room, a few hundred millimetres above someone's head. No amount of grille design fixes that.

Parex Industries has spent a long time making the opposite argument. In 2008 the company introduced external motor extraction to the New Zealand market, moving the motor out of the ceiling and onto the roof or an external wall, with the duct doing the work in between. The noise and the vibration leave the room along with the motor. That idea reshaped kitchen extraction here. Amore has now taken it into wet areas, which is arguably where it made the most sense all along.

Amore Quiet Bathroom Fans run the same German built EX-Drive motor platform, mounted externally, drawing 62 watts. Single room systems use a 650 m³/hr motor. Two room systems use a 900 m³/hr motor serving two spaces from one external unit, which matters on a floor plan where a bathroom and a separate toilet sit back to back and a second in ceiling unit would simply mean a second noise source. Three vent faces are available, Halo, Pure and Breeze, with black variants available.

For specifiers, the work moves upstream. Motor position, duct path and the roof or wall penetration need resolving early, alongside the usual remote motor disciplines: keep runs short, minimise bends, insulate. Ducting is supplied in three metre lengths. The EX-Drive motor carries a five year warranty, and the vent assembly is made in New Zealand.

The trade-off is an honest one. An external motor system asks for more coordination at design stage than a ceiling unit does. What it returns is a wet area extracting at a genuine rate without the sound of it, which in a bathroom is the entire point.

Amore is supported nationwide by Parex Industries.