If you haven't read Kevin's fantastic post on using fans, do so now!

Summer's drawing to an end, so this is probably the worst time to be posting about big fans, but I archived this fascinating article about two months ago when it was actually hot, thinking I'd come back to it to buy one someday.  As always, I survived the dreaded heat and looking back, it didn't seem that bad.

Oh well, maybe next summer.

The interesting key point I recalled from the article is that having one of these puppies in combination with an AC unit at about 83-84 F would feel the same as having just the AC at about 75 F, but with a ton of energy savings.  I've read that each degree you decrease on the thermostat causes a 10% increase in energy consumption!

In related news, I would like to talk about the best $8 I ever spent.  I was moving into my freshman year dorm back in 2004 and realized there was no AC!  Feeling the heat, I went to Wal-Mart with my parents and found a Honeywell tabletop fan (HT-800) advertised.  It was supercheap and small so I wasn't expecting much, but man, that thing blew me away!  For the first few weeks of Fall when it was still hot, while I slept, it blasted wind into my face, and when it became cold, I still had it gusting in my room since it was so good at drowning out noise coming from late-night freshman partyers.  Apparently it was so noisy that Honeywell, a few years after, revised the HT-800 to the HT-900 claiming a 25% reduction in noise, but all they did was decrease the power so that its new high setting was equivalent to the low setting of the previous model!  With a $25 price tag on Amazon, all I have are regrets that I didn't stock up more back in '04.

Sigh, I wish I could go back to the days of the honeywell f...I mean college. Yea those were the days

Written by Danh, September 2011