A British fellow named Dyson has invented a new kind of fan with no blades. The Dyson site says the fans “produce an uninterrupted stream of smooth air, with no unpleasant buffeting.”
By “unpleasant buffeting” do they mean the blast of air that a good fan produces, so you get cooled off when you’re hot? I’ve spent a good portion of my life living in the California central valley, and it gets quite hot here, so me the entire point of a fan is to be able to stand right in front of a sort of mini wind-tunnel and be buffeted.
Do British people, used as they are to a more temperate climate, dislike this? Or is it your basic advertising technique where they want to make you realize that you need a bladeless fan?
I take it to mean ‘pulses’ of air. Rather than coming out in a steady stream, fluids accelerated by blades have pressure waves because of the gaps between the blades. Of course the blades in a fan tend to be fairly large, and the fan is spinning at a pretty good speed. There have been cases where workers have become ill due to giant, slowly-turning fans in hangars and factories; but with common household fans it’s a non-issue. It’s just a marketing ploy.
I take it to mean the air stream is chopped up, not continuous. But I have to wonder how much of what they are bragging about is reduced noise, as opposed to improved cooling effect.
When I first saw that commercial, I thought it was a really amazing solution for something that wasn’t really a problem for anyone. It kinda made me giggle.
My friend was visiting when the commercial came on. She said that a better model would have absolutely no air coming out of it at all. ‘See how well it works?’
I stood in front of a Dyson fan in a best buy yesterday. I didn’t notice much difference between its airflow and that of a regular fan. It was much quieter, but it also cost about $300.
This seems to be the bottom line. Is it worth that much money to you to have a household fan that makes less noise? Of course, if most people really DO find the airflow equivalent and the lower noise level less obtrusive, they may eventually get made cheaper.
One thing that occurs to me is that you could possibly incorporate this sort of thing into the window casement, and have a “fan” built into every openable window in the house, rather than having to take up space with a separate appliance.
I have nothing to add to the OP, except that I first heard about the Dyson vacuum cleaner from the TV ad in the US. I’ve never heard of that company before, and I wrongly assumed that it was just an American company that hired a British actor to make their overpriced products somehow seem more sophisticated, pandering to the upper middle class snobs. That was until one day I saw the exact same ad in the UK. For some reasons, I actually have more respect for the company after that.
Nevertheless, I probably still won’t be buying their stuff.
I can’t imagine that the British are any more impressed with that idiotic sales pitch than Americans are. I’m sure there are similar proportions of folk who are so excited by the “coolness” that they overlook the fact that no one was complaining about choppy air or buffeting in the first place, as well as of people who stare at the ring and don’t realize that it’s just a ducted fan, and not bladeless at all.
I think the only Brit vs Yank issue here is the assumption by that particular Brit that his accent makes him sound more authoritative. To my ear, he sounds like a pompous prick. It’s a fine line, and he doesn’t know how to walk it.
The guy is a pompous prick, he sold out to far eastern manufacturing and kicked the actual British manufacturing plant in the nuts. No self respecting person in the UK would buy his products, fanless or otherwise.
