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.
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.
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.
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.
Get a Vornado standing fan, and aim it at the opposing wall. You’ll feel a breeze everywhere in the room.
Is standing fan not good enough?
