At the last apartment I lived in, I thought the people in the unit below me were constantly running an unbalanced washing machine, as I would frequently hear this loud, rhythmic THUNKA THUNKA THUNKA THUNKA coming from underneath my floor, usually for hours at a time. At least, I assumed it was a washing machine, since nobody has that much stamina for it to have been anything else, I thought.
After a few weeks, I put in a noise complaint because it was starting to get irritating. When the management followed up a few days later, they told me that the tenant below me just had their ceiling fan at full speed and two of the bolts unthreaded themselves, causing it to knock around wildly. And the tenant was deaf, so she had no clue her ceiling fan was only a few days from loosening itself completely and falling apart.
It’s honestly a little insane that after over a hundred years, we haven’t come up with a better way to move air around a room without dangling 50 pounds of spinning death above your head.
Ceiling fans are actually quite secure if they’re mounted and balanced properly. Problem is that a lot of people don’t know that:
A.) You can’t just bolt a fan onto a junction box designed to hold a light. Well, you can but it’ll eventually fall out of the ceiling.
B.) You can balance the fan by adding weights that stick on the back of the blades.
How do you determine where to place the weights?
There are tutorials online explaining how to do it but you have to know to look them up.
Very basically you run the fan at its lowest speed and watch to see where it wobbles and you put the weight on the opposite side of the pointer which it wobbles. Usually about 25% of the way along the length but you have to do a bit of trial and error to work out exactly how far along it needs to be.
But it’s better to watch the videos because they’re clearer and it’s easier to understand when you have a visual reference
This is also how tire balancing works for cars. Except they have a machine that does the calculations for position and weight.
There are other ways to move air effectively, but it takes a lot more complexity. Those Dyson fans are an example, they move a lot of air with a much smaller fan.
I think you probably saved her life
Get a Vornado standing fan, and aim it at the opposing wall. You’ll feel a breeze everywhere in the room.
There are better ways of moving air around, but since they involve high voltage plasma they are probably even less safe.
Although at least it be quiet.
Is standing fan not good enough?
Opens up some floor space & may lead guests to assume you can afford ceiling fans
those take floor space and barely move any air.
My desk fan has three settings
- Stormy wind
- Sand blaster
- Jet engine
I actualy set up a trailing edge dimmer to calm her down, sometimes you just need a gentle breeze.
all I want is a celing fan with a sand blaster setting. it would help for when you almost need an air conditioner, but don’t want to get a window unit.
There was a fan in my last fire departments bay (where the trucks are kept) named (for real) “Big Ass Fan”. It was literally 20 feet across with metal blades and the adjustment was a percentage from 1 to 100%. 100% was a whirling death wind of speed and sound. If a blade where to ever fly off it would put a hole through a wall or slice a man in two.
Yeah, big ass fans are absolutely awesome. Their biggest over head fan is 30ft (10m) across
Me saying 20 feet was just a guess. Now I’m wondering if it’s the 24 or 30 footer. I’ll have to pay a visit and see. Lol.
But yeah, it worked crazy good.
Properly built, properly installed ceiling fans don’t vibrate. My $70 dollar ceiling fan from a big-box hardware store has no vibration whatsoever, even at maximum speed.
That’s because it’s new. The wobbling ones are not the cheap ones, they’re just old. People buy a house and it has a fan and they never think about it just like you never think about a light fitting.
The one in my grandmother’s house is probably around 50 years old, no one thought about it until it basically disintegrated one day and then we realized that no one has any idea when she bought it. Found a manufacturing date on a label.
BAY BLADE BAY BLADE LET IT RIP!
Is it really a freak accident when it’s written on the control nob?
You just need a cheap ceiling fan balancing kit to fix that. Pretty much every fan comes with one, but almost everyone skips that step in the instructions during installation.
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