Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/19/changing-the-direction-of-your.html
…
5 Likes
Make sure to wipe the dust off the blades before switching the direction.
35 Likes
Don’t think you survive long in AZ without learning that.
13 Likes
Switching it will make you feel cooler when you’re in there, but it’s likely not the reason that room is so hot. The fans just help with proper air circulation and, for cooling, convective heat loss from your skin.
I’m guessing that upstairs room might have a knee wall attic? If so, those are almost never sealed and insulated properly, and thus are like ovens when it’s hot out. I can fix that right up for you or at least send you a diagram of what needs to be done.
12 Likes
either direction helps mix air in the room. if you’re running an active system it doesn’t matter too much which direction you have set as you’ll eventually get the room a mostly uniform temperature.
I prefer the up direction when I sleep precisely because I don’t want the wind chill effect.
12 Likes
Or Virginia. So swampy now you can swim thru the air.
Ceiling fans are from heaven. I have a room with a15ft ceiling that wouldn’t be comfortable without one. Plus it helps spin the Calder-like mobile I made.
17 Likes
That is so wrong. Here: In summer, open all the curtains and windows as soon in the evening as it’s cooler outside than in. Turn the ceiling fan to pull air /up/ in the center, pushing hot ceiling air down the walls and out the windows. Cool air comes in the bottom of the windows.
If that won’t work because the windows are not tall, put a big box fan in the window on one end of the house and blow air out. Put another box fand in the window on the other end of the house and blow air in. Replace all the hot indoor air with outside air and keep it moving.
7 Likes
Yes, and I alway forget which direction is appropriate for which season!
5 Likes
That’s the kind of thing I have to look up every time. I have trouble with dualities: left/right, up/down, good/evil.
Although I don’t bother adjusting the ceiling fan in my current house. It’s an older house, and the bedroom (the room with the lone ceiling fan) tends to be warmer than the rest of the house especially in the winter. So a little cool air is almost always welcome.
4 Likes
Lesson learned, for sure!
3 Likes
I don’t know about any attic in the house… Bay Area house.
4 Likes
Ummm - it has nothing to do with clockwise or counterclockwise.
It depends on how the blades are slanted. If the higher edge of the blade is leading the fan blows down; if the lower edge leads, it pulls air up.
6 Likes
Everyone does. It’s a bugbear of mine that it is widely pretended not to be a problem. We always say “oh, I have trouble telling left from right ha ha” as though it’s a ditzy thing to have trouble with, but if you assume you don’t have trouble with that, it probably means your understanding of the words is tied to very specific situations (like “the side of the road you drive on is the right side”), and you haven’t yet encountered the situation where this in itself is a problem.
It’s an infuriatingly persistent design mistake to think “what could be simpler than on vs. off / left vs. right / positive vs. negative”, and you end up with buttons where the user can’t tell if it will do the thing they want or the exact opposite of the thing they want, or tax instructions that lead you to add when you should have subtracted. The right design choice is nearly always to add complexity when this comes up.
Instead of teaching kids about left and right, as if they’re dumb for not getting it, it would be better to teach them how neither “left” nor “right” means anything on its own.
6 Likes
This explains so much…I’ve had all my ceiling fans set to “evil” for years! Sorry folks, I’ll have 2020 straightened out right quick once I flip these switches.
12 Likes
Is the slanting not standardized?
1 Like
Me too, and the reversing switch is on top of the fan. 
4 Likes
Not attic in the traditional sense. If there are sloped ceilings that transition to horizontal walls before reaching the acute angle of the roof/floor juncture, then behind those walls is likely what we call a knee wall attic. A triangular space encompassed by roof deck, horizontal wall, and ceiling of downstairs room. These are notoriously incorrectly treated in terms of thermal performance.
2 Likes
I’m from Cape Cod so when you say “attic” I think “ATTIC.” My 1930s house has a flat roof… spanish style. So maybe not?? Nothing is insulated correctly in the Bay Area.
5 Likes
Meh. All air moving around makes you feel cooler, and the point about the downdraft only matters if you’re directly under the fan. I would say the more important thing is: slower in the winter, so you get the rising hot air mixed around, but as little actual air movement as possible that makes people feel chilly.
2 Likes
The whole direction of fan thing seems like such bullshit. As long as it’s on, it will create a breeze, cooling you off. The “warmer in winter” thing comes up every winter and never ceases to annoy me. Do you really thing you have a huge temperature gradient in your room? Maybe if you live in a cathedral. Otherwise, you’re just moving same-temperature air around and making yourself less warm, because of the windchill. I’ve tried to track down the origin of this urban legend, but all I find on the internet is the variations on the same one-paragraph explanation “because warm air rises” with no source or calculations or anything.
1 Like
