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Tag: ceiling fans

  • Ceiling Fans: Fast And Easy Cleaning Tips

    Ceiling fans are a luxury to some but a necessity to most. While they can help keep us cool in hot weather, they can be difficult to clean. If you don’t clean your ceiling fans you might notice how much dust can accumulate on the blades. Dirty fans can lead to poor air quality in a room or home and the dirt and dust can even cause your fan to stop working properly. Don’t neglect your ceiling fan, use these tips to help you clean it quickly and easily.

    Feather Dusters
    Feather dusters are a popular choice when it comes to cleaning a ceiling fan, but they can actually make the dust problem in your home worse. Only use feather dusters on fans with a light amount of dust. Feather dusters can cause heavy dust to scatter around your home and accumulate in other places.

    Vacuum Cleaner
    You use your vacuum cleaner to get the dust and dirt off your floors, so why not use it on your fan as well. Of course, you will need the attachments or a handheld vacuum cleaner to clean the blades. Vacuum cleaners are great for cleaning ceiling fans because they remove the dust instead of just spreading it around your home.

    Commercial Tools
    There are numerous dusting tools that can be used on fans. Some brands offer extendable handles to make reaching the blades easier. Regardless of the brand you choose, most of these tools are made the same and are designed to trap or collect the dust as they sweep across it. They are also affordable and easy to use.

    What To Avoid
    Avoid using a broom to clean the fans. Not only will the broom miss most of the dust, it may also damage the fan. If you want to use a cloth to wipe the fan blades, make sure it is damp. The dampness will cause the dust to stick to the cloth. A dry cloth will only spread the dust and dirt to other places in your home. Avoid using harsh chemicals and cleaning products that are not designed for the surface of your fan. They could damage it.

    Don’t let something as simple and easy as cleaning a fan become a hassle. Let these tips help you get the job done faster.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Ceiling Fan Business Makes a Big Ass of Itself

    Big Ass Fans, in Lexington, Kentucky, knows that their business is normally the sort of thing that exists in an industrial park somewhere, ships out to retailers, and doesn’t make much of a splash, name-wise. Think about it. What is the brand name of any ceiling fan in your home? Most ceiling fan companies just aren’t household names.

    Big Ass Fans plays a different game. They design, manufacture, and sell the world’s largest fans. They are a $122-million company, and employ over 500 people.

    When Carey Smith started the company in 1999, it had one of the usual, run-of-the-mill fan company names, HVLS Fan Co. The product HVLS put out is unique in and of itself. The company’s industrial ceiling fans are large, slower speed, and rather than using typical fan blades, use air foils.

    In 2002, after months of hearing his own customers refer to his product as “big-ass fans,” Smith made the daring name switch. Once Big Ass Fans put a mural on the side of their street-side building, sent out mailers, and started advertising open employment positions under that name, people started to take notice.

    The company was slated to post some large display advertising in Lexington’s Bluegrass Airport ahead of a major tourist event. The airport pulled the plug on the Big Ass ad. They have since reconciled, but things were touch and go for a while.

    The joke behind the name is the company’s mascot, Fanny the Donkey. You can’t drive through Lexington without seeing at least one t-shirt, ball cap, or bumper sticker emblazoned with the Big Ass name and/or Fanny logo.

    But the humor does seem to miss some folks.

    The company has actually recently had a name change, moving from “Big Ass Fans” to “Big Ass Solutions”. The name change reflects the launch of the Big Ass Light Group, which includes the new Big Ass High Bay LED light fixture for industrial and commercial spaces.

    The company is more than just a daring, risqué name, though. Smith is not running a ceiling fan company that churns out the same product as every other fan builder — same basic almost-interchangeable equipment, with different colors and designs on the blades and pull chain.

    Big Ass has innovated in the home ceiling fan market, including the SenseME model of their Haiku fan, marketed as “The World’s First Smart Ass Fan”. It features an on-board computer and array of sensors.

    Smith boasts that the SenseME model allows you to:

    * Forget the switch: SenseME knows when you enter or leave a room and turns Haiku on and off automatically.
    * Forget the chains: SenseME monitors the room’s temperature and humidity, adjusting Haiku’s speed when conditions change.
    * Forget discomfort: SenseME learns your comfort preferences, tailoring those speed adjustments to what you find comfortable.

    Big Ass Solutions, starting with Big Ass Fans and moving now into Big Ass Light Group, is making a name for itself with its product. The name is just part of the fun.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Can These Ceiling Fans Kill You in Your Sleep?

    Many folks have ceiling fans in their homes. They are great for circulating air in both summer and winter months. But did you know that millions of people believe that ceiling fans can kill you?

    The belief, which is widely held in South Korea, is called “fan death”. It technically applies to any electric fan, including ceiling fans, that are in the room with a sleeping person. The belief has no basis in science, but that does not stop people from coming up with pseudo-scientific ideas about what may “cause” it.

    The urban legends about fan death are as old as the technology itself. When electric fans were first introduced to Korea, stories of asphyxiation and facial paralysis in sleeping people started circulating.

    Some say that hypothermia is the culprit, that the fan lowers the room temperature too much. But fans do not lower room temperature. They comply circulate the air that is there. The cooling effect you feel is due to the fan blowing away your own radiant body heat, which only lowers the body temp a couple of degrees.

    This is why ceiling fans have no benefit unless a person is in the room where one is blowing. Engineers commonly tell homeowners looking for energy savings to turn off ceiling fans when no one is in the room. They are doing nothing but wasting energy.

    Scientific argument does not stop people from repeating these stories. Even the media runs with them every summer in South Korea, such as this story in the Korea Herald in 2011.

    A man reportedly died on Monday morning after sleeping with an electric fan running. The 59 years-old victim, only known by his surname Min, was found dead with the fan fixed directly at him.

    The South Korean government even warns about fan death as a “summer hazard”. It lists “asphyxiation from electric fans and air conditioners” as among the Top Five causes of death in summer.

    Some say that the belief was intentionally started by the South Korean government decades ago as a way to get people to conserve energy by turning off their electric fans at night.

    Researchers have spoken out against the myth, insisting that someone “is not going to die from hypothermia because their body temperature drops two or three degrees overnight; it would have to drop eight to ten degrees.” They say that these deaths that have been attributed to fans were likely caused by some other undiagnosed or unfound condition, but the forensics investigators on the scene saw a fan and jumped to an erroneous conclusion.

    Dr. Lee Yoon-song, a professor at Seoul National University’s medical school, says there is a reason these “fan deaths” seem to happen a lot in Korea. It is the media.

    “Korean reporters are constantly writing inaccurate articles about death by fan, describing these deaths as being caused by the fan. That’s why it seems that fan deaths only happen in Korea, when in reality these types of deaths are quite rare. They should have reported the victim’s original defects, such as heart or lung disease, which are the main cause of death in these cases.”

    Here is an actual Korean news report that attributed a death to leaving a fan on the sleeper.

    Image via YouTube