Another year-round fan user here. There can be snow on the ground outside and I will be in pajamas with seventeen layers of blankets tucked in around me, but I can’t sleep without that fan.
Any of you fan users tried a cat?
The cat will get up and leave in the middle of the night, taking its soothing purring sounds with it. Perhaps it will start to play with something, chasing it around the floor and making decidedly non-soothing skittering sounds under the bed. Or else it will start meowing plaintively at 4:00 am.
The fan does none of these things.
I’m in the fan/AC category. I pretend it’s the ocean.
Likewise.
Last time I tried sharing my bed with a cat was at my sisters house. It kept trying to bite my hand.
Last time I tried sharing a bed with a cat in my own home, he kept trying to push me off the bed!
Google for Marpac brand “sound conditioners”; I have 2 models, the Sleep Mate and the Sound Screen (which, oddly enough, is marked “Electrical Fan” on its serial number label). No timers, nothing but a somewhat adjustable whirring sound. Purely analog.
I use a fan in the summer, but it makes the room too cold in the winter. Also, fans wear out and start to wobble and rattle a lot faster than the Marpac machines do. Rattles aren’t restful.
I have tried a digital machine (I think it was also a Marpac, and it was expensive) and found it useless owing to a subtle but detectable pause whenever the recorded sound looped back, which was often. That sort of repetitious effect is the very thing guaranteed to ruin my sleep. I stay awake waiting for the next repeat, and the result is no sleep. Dripping faucets and barking dogs have the same effect, which is why I have white noise machines in the first place (and why rattling fans are useless to me).
Another fan user here. Our ceiling fan broke, and I have a tall oscillating fan. First we fall asleep to the TV which is on a timer. The fan handles the rest of the need for white noise.
You know what sucks? A power outage! Regardless of the need for AC, the lack of white noise will wake me up!
I walked into work yesterday to an unusual quiet. The AC wasn’t running! It is a very familiar background noise. (I know it’s February - check my location! We need Ac almost all year round.)
Yeah, yeah, I know, pecans in the bathtub at 4:00 Ante Meredian.
I just leave a fan on all night. They don’t use much power, and the constant hummimg sound blocks my (mild) tinnitus.
Of course I live in a place that is hot and humid all year, by my standards anyway. So I actually need to have the fan to keep cool anyway.
No kidding! That and traveling/camping when bringing a fan isn’t practical - I take sleeping pills in those situations. Total complete silence keeps me awake.
This thread is cool because now I have a list of Dopers I can sleep with. 
My SO hates my fan.
I do sleep with cats, usually at least two. My 16 year-old cat likes sleeping right on my pillow, directly in the path of the fan breeze; he must like it too.
My current fan is a Vornado. When it dies I’ll buy an identical fan.
That sounds creepy as hell.
Check…under…the floorboards…
Several other threads have discussed tinnitus here and I’ve posted the same link before with no response, but I’ll give it another go.
A local university has come up with supposedly fantastic treatment for tinnitus and the commercial incarnation of this is Neuromonics.
It’s just annoying. Sometimes at night I can’t tell if it’s crickets or something in my head.
I don’t habitually use white noise makers. But since my Tinnitus has been unusually bad recently:( , I’ve downloaded Soundmasker and Tinnitus Masker Pro. They’re pretty neat in that the frequency can be adjusted and have different noise types like Brown, Pink, Violet, Blue, White, and ‘natural’ noises. You have to register (buy) the software or every 5 minutes a recording of “this copy is unregistered” plays.
When it’s raining, the downspout just outside my bedroom wall leaks and drips. Bang bang bang bang bang. Then I turn on the little air filter on a table next to my side of the bed (the filter itself was long ago used up, and thrown away, so it’s really just the fan running). It has 3 different speeds: quiet, medium, and really damn loud. I rarely have to use the last one. In the summer we often use an oscillating fan to the same effect.
I was going to post just to tell you this. It sounds like you have the same machine that I have.
I brought this machine with me when I visited my parents once. It was set to “Summer Night.” My dad spent about 10 minutes looking for the cricket in the house before he realized the sound was on a loop. 
The heartbeat sound - my sound machine has it, and yes, it’s weird. I can’t imagine anyone actually picking that. It creeps me out.