One of the must haves, or things that should be installed in a RV as standard equipment are powered vents. Such is the case with my RV. The ceiling vents in the Living Room and Bathroom are powered, but the one in the bedroom is not. I suppose though that a Mulligan might be given to my RV's manufacturer as they did plumb the front (non-powered) vent for the addition of a second Air Conditioner, with 12VDC, 120VAC, and thermostat wiring adjacent to the vent, along with duct-work. I can see that they probably figure most RV'ers will upgrade anyway.

But I live in the upper Midwest, and although it is 91deg today, a single air conditioner can handle it. And I don't plan on ever visiting Florida, Texas, or Arizona in the summertime - so a single air conditioner should handle winter weather in the south US.

But there are nights in my area when it's not hot enough for the Air Conditioner to kick in, but still gets a bit stuffy. For that reason, we decided to upgrade the bedroom vent to a power vent.

I had looked at several different vents, including the project I did on my Class C whereby I upgraded the non-powered Ventline vents to powered ones (same vent as I now have). I was able to do that without having to change out the vent upper - which meant no climbing on the roof to replace a vent. So that is certainly an option here.

I then ran across Heng's Vortex II upgrade kit, which allows you to upgrade not only a Heng's vent, but many competitive vents, including those from Ventline and Jensen. And it features a much larger fan, has 3 forward, and 2 reverse speeds. It's also designed to install with just a screwdriver; no drilling (but you might have to do a bit of electrical work, depending on your rig). I like that. So I bought one.

Since a source of 12V power was available at the vent, installation was pretty straightforward - or it would have been had the instruction sheet been included. I attempted to contact Heng's customerservice email several times, only to find out that their email address is wrong. The correct email address is "customerservice@hengsind.us".

So the dialog with customer service went like this...

Back to reality. I ended up using the spacer that I should not have for the Ventline vent, so I had to remove it. The result is the vent open/close knob didn't bind like it originally did. I am using the Bauer shade on the vent and it works on the upgrade. The only issue is somewhat restricted access to the knob and controls, but you can mitigate that a bit by orienting the shade to provide the best clearance.

I like the idea of the screen, It pops off with a slight twist so you can remove it for cleaning.

A major issue for me is my dislike of the design of the control switch. While simple is good, I particularly dislike the use of current limiting resistors for the motor speed control as shown in the control board schematic.

This wastes power.

In a boondocking situation, this is not good.

It would have been far better should a PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) technique be used for the motor speed as the motor is a simple DC single field coil motor.

News from RV'ers having installed such kits is the control switch may only last a couple of years. If mine goes belly-up, I will have to research a PWM solution.