Having had to just toss out another one-year old fan, I need to blow off steam. I just can’t understand why this hasn’t been the subject of a huge class-action or Better Business Bureau investigation.
I’m talking of course about the criminally short life span of electric fans. Now an electric fan is just about as simple as anything with moving parts can be. A blade is turned by an electric motor. About the only part of a fan that possibly can wear out are the bearings (or are they called bushings?) that support the main spindle that the motor turns. So what do the manufacturers do? They put in the cheapest, lousiest bearings possible- guaranteed to last at most a few thousand hours. So I junk yet another otherwise perfectly good fan because two $1.00 parts the size of a pea are shot, and you can’t get just those parts replaced.
If they would only put in decent bearings, a fan would last for years or even decades. In fact someone who bought a GE or Westinghouse fan back in 1960 might still have it in working condition. But then of course they wouldn’t sell a ton of brand new fans every year. You can compare room fans to the fans mounted in exhaust vents, which are a lot harder to service or replace. How often do they wear out?!