I'm so manly...I installed two ceiling fans

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

And am now under one sipping a mint julep.

I’d always wanted a ceiling fan in my bedroom, but I didn’t think it would work with my setup. Originally, the room had a ceiling light. Years ago, I installed two wall sconces. I removed the ceiling fixture and ran the wires from the wall lights up into the attic and down into the…the…the boxy thing where connections are made.

I figured if I wanted to install a ceiling fan there, it would be at the mercy of the wall lights; i.e., the only way to get power to the fan would be to turn the lights on, which isn’t pleasant when I’m trying to sleep.

But I finally decided that I wanted a fan, and so halfway through the project, I decided to do a google search to see how switches work. I’ve always noticed that wires to fixtures keep going. They don’t stop, so I thought that somehow the power obviously kept going even when the lights are turned off at the switch. And I noticed the lights connected to a red wire and ignored the black wires so I figured…and was right. The red wire goes to the switch. I connected the fan to the black wire and voila…the fan now runs independently of the wall switch. I also had to put in a block of 2 x 6 between the rafters for the fan to mount in. What a stud!

I love the fan so much I installed another one in here, my computer room. This one I did connect to the light switch. I bought a fan with a light kit, and in the winter when I don’t use a ceiling fan I’ll just use the switch to run the lights on the fan.

I dunno if it was luck that the first fan needed no balancing. It was perfect, although at top speed it makes a subtle helicopter noise.

The second fan was WAY out of balance. I was kinda pissed. But I used the balancing kit and actually read/followed the directions, and now it’s rock steady. And this one doesn’t helicopter at top speed. Again, the worst part was crawling around the filthy attic (term used charitably…I have a pyramid shaped roof, and it’s more a “crawl” space than an attic. And the house is tiny) to install the 2 x 6.

Total time to install two ceiling fans, including multiple trips to the hardware store: ten hours. At the least the second one went faster.

2

Heh, you did better than me.

I can remember one time many years ago I decided that I needed a ceiling fan while undeer the influence of way too many beers.

So I went to Home Depot and bought a fan. But I couldn’t just buy any old fan. No sir. I had to go and buy a freakishly large ceiling fan normally ment for warehouses and such.

Anyway, I took it home, installed it and then turned the fucker on high. Before I know it I’ve got like an F3 hurricane going on in my bedroom. The crap on my nightstand is all blowing over and a picture fell off the wall. (It was a real Tim Allen moment.)

I took it down the next day.

Let this be a lesson to ya’ kids. Don’t go to Home Depot while drunk.

3

LOL! That is a great story.

And the part I left out…I hatched this great idea while at the Portland Brewers’ Festival…and went to Home Depot straight from the fest. I’m not making that up.

4

Next stop: Load-bearing interior walls!

Oh, yeah. I brew beer, too.

5

You can actually use it in the winter, too. Just reverse it, so that it pushes the warm air down from the ceiling to where you are. (Many of them have a little switch on the side to reverse them.)

6

Based on my limited knowledge, it sounds like you got a little bit lucky in how the thing was wired originally. It could very easily have been a set up with one black and one white wire coming from the switch, with the lights being the end point of the circuit. Then you would have been at the mercy of the switch.

But either way - Good job! :slight_smile:

7

Thanks to this post, I now know that fans occasionally need balancing. Like perhaps the one in my wife’s office. So this week I will join in the general manlyness and . . . balance my wife’s fan (if you know what I mean. . .)

And to think that some people call reading the SDMB a waste of time!

8

They make fans that have remote controls. Jus’ sayin’…

9

Are they counter-rotating fans? that would be cool…

10

Yeah, they say reverse it in winter, but why wouldn’t I just run it blowing air down? The warm air will be at the ceiling…won’t I want it blown down?

11

This is one thing I paid to have done. I hate, hate, HATE paying another man to come into my castle and do stuff, but I couldn’t pass this up. The fan I wanted at Lowe’s was $160. I contemplated it, asked the wife (begged, really), and got shot down. I knew we needed new fans… the old ones were so cheap and ugly! My wife, on the other hand, would not relent. This went on for a few weeks, with no resolution for me…

Then we got one of those “Savvy Shopper” coupon books in the mail. A local ceiling fan store (I was shocked those existed) had a coupon in there: free installation, and fans priced below the box stores! I convinced my wife to accompany me to the store, where we found the fan we wanted two of… for $190 each. The salesman came and talked to us; this fan was better than the ones at the big chain stores (I can’t verify this, of course), yadda yadda yadda… then he looked at the tag and said, “I’ll do it for $140 each. In fact, I’ll get you out the door at exactly $300. (The total sales tax in Gilbert, AZ is 8.1%, so this saved us about two dollars) Plus, we’ll install it for free and I include a lifetime no-wobble warranty. If either of these ever wobbles, call me and I’ll come out and fix it.”

I looked at him like he was some sort of crazy angel. “Really? Lifetime?”

He looked me dead in the eye and said, “I’ve been doing this for 17 years. You don’t get to own a ceiling fan store for that long unless you do your jobs right.”

That sold me. He had them installed within a week, and they don’t wobble a bit. Plus, the motors are WAY quieter than the old ceiling fans!

12

You got two ceiling fans you love, installed, for that price?

As far as I’m concerned, you’re a bigger stud than I am. It’s one thing to do something manly…but to pay someone else for LESS money than if you’d done it…that deserves a salute and a drink!

13

Because if the fan is blowing air down onto you, people tend to see this as a breeze and feel colder. (Even blowing warm air – because it is NOT as warm – 98.6ºF – as your body.)

So the fan blowing ‘up’ will circulate the air across the ceiling and down the walls, thus tending to keep the whole room at a consistent, warmer temperature.

14

I’ve got a solitary woodfire stove in the kitchen that keeps my whole house warm…because the ceiling fans (set for the winter-downward cycling) help distribute the warmth right through. I’ve experimented with setting them on the summer (upward) cycle, and it doesn’t work nearly half as well…especially to extend the heating into the bedroom areas of the house.

Y’see, even with ceiling insulation, SOME heat is lost through the ceilings, and blowing the warm air upwards will increase that loss. Blowing the air down will not only increase the ambient temperature, but will warm walls, floors and furnishings and allow them to radiate that heat off later.

15

This story is pure awesome!

16

My buddy and I don’t understand why Home Depot doesn’t sell beer. They’d sell a lot of beer to the impulse control victims who shop there, and they’d sell probably 50% more material to the same guys who screwed up their projects because they were half smashed. I’m almost certain that a store can sell booze and circular saws with no fear of legal action.

And yeah, installing a ceiling fan is the fast track to hero-dom.