While the sale of air-conditioners continues to grow, many home owners overlook ceiling fans despite the fact that they can make a room feel four to five degrees cooler!
- 1) Effectively cools a room by 3-5 degrees in summer
- 2) Cheap to run at 3 cents an hour
- 3) The good ones are quiet making it easy to sleep with them on
- 4) Work in winter as well to lower your heating costs
- 5) Reduce mould by increasing circulation
- 6) Dissuades flys and insects if installed over the dining table
Here are some other great benefits of ceiling fans:
– They can complement air-conditioners and help them run more efficiently which is better for the environment, and significantly reduces electricity bills.
– Ceiling fans are also helpful if installed above dining tables or kitchens because they dissuade flying pests from entering the room.
– Today’s ceiling fans are more efficient, with improvements in motors, controls, blade design and reduced weight making them a feature of a room instead of an eyesore.
– A recent innovation in ceiling fans is the latest version of the Hunter Pacific Typhoon fan in which moulded plastic blades.
– The Typhoon moulded design promotes large amounts of airflow with minimal noise, and is safe to use in areas where inadvertent contactwith fans blades may occur
Switchting on your homes ceiling fan in conjunction with an air con will save power, forcing the air-conditioner to run with greater efficiency as the fan circulates the cool air more effectively. To put it into perspective, running a ceiling fan constantly has the same financial impact as leaving a 60watt light bulb on accidentally overnight. Chump change compared to the dangerous air conditioning bill.
Cooling benefits of energy efficient ceiling fans over the summer months are widely understood however most people don’t know that ceiling fans are also useful in creating a comfortable environment through the winter months. They do this by evenly distributing warm air around a room. Quality modern ceiling fans like the ones we supply also include a ‘winter mode’.
We typically close up our houses in winter to the warm air in and the cold air out. Unfortunately this creates limited circulation resulting in the warm air rising to the ceiling and cool air pooling close the floor where we spend most of our time. This leads us to turning up the thermostat to ensure the space we occupy is comfortable. In rooms with high ceilings this effect is particularly apparent.
This problem is easily avoided by turning your ceiling fans to ‘winter mode’ and then turning the fans on. All quality ceiling fans have a ‘winter mode’ that reverses the direction of rotation of the ceiling fan blades, preventing the cooling draft that we use in the hotter months. It does this by drawing air up to the fan from the middle of the room and then pushing it out along the ceiling and then back down the walls, gently mixing the air.
To turn on the ‘winter mode’ of most ceiling fans is a simple task, they will usually have a switch on the motor housing or hub of the ceiling fan. Simply flick the knob from ‘summer’ to ‘winter’. Some fans will inset their winter switch so not to detract from the styling of the fan.
When running the fan in winter it is nearly always best to run it on low speed. All you are trying to achieve is to gently mix the air without creating a draft. The exception to this is when you have a particularly large space and vaulted ceilings.
