I bought a Korean-made air conditioner the other day. I was reading through the instruction manual and it contained the following warnings:
The second, third, and fourth warnings seem legitimate to me. But is the first a legitimate warning? Or is it just a nod to the Korean fear of fan death?
What terrible things could happen if a person remained in the airflow for an extended period of time?
Hypothermia and/or dehydration.
Does the second one make any sense, either? Using a stove or fire in a room without adequate ventialtion is a bad idea, full stop. I don’t see how using a fan in said room would make it any worse. Unless it is to warn people who might have the idea that blowing air from a fan around the room is somehow equivalent to “ventilation”?
Isn’t Korea where they think if you sleep in the same room as a fan, it’ll kill you? That may be part of it.
If I’m reading this correctly, it’s not a regular box or ceiling fan, it’s for a window AC. So it’s trying to let the user know that it’s not going to exchange inside air for fresh outside air. That’s a legitimate warning, IMO, if you live in a small space and think you can use it as an exhaust fan while you cook (on a gas stove) all day.
If there is no food within immediate reach of the airflow, you should eventually leave the airflow to prevent starvation. Other than that, very little will happen.
Some Koreans still use briquettes to heat their homes, when I lived there there were often piles of the hexagonal charcoal Yeontan waiting to be either delivered or removed. I think the origins of ‘fan death’ stem from many families succoming because of noxious fumes and inadequate ventilation. Think of fan death as an absurd superstition akin to walking under a ladder - you know it has no basis in fact but it’s easy to avoid, rather than testing your luck.
The first warning, to my understanding, is giving a nod to those people who prefer not to use air conditioners and microwave appliances because of the resulting, perceived, problems to your health that cannot be completely disproved.
One other thing, Koreans certainly aren’t deficient when it comes to surviving low or high temperatures. In summer temperatures can easily breach 35c, with high humidity, and in winter -25c is not unknown.
Considering both the thread title and the OP content, I fail to see what your comment is supposed to add.
I disagree. AC outflow is both cold and very dry. Under certain conditions - passing out for medical or chemical reasons, or just being immobile (certain types of highly affected individuals), sitting in a strong AC output could cause both hypothermia and dehydration. It’s a stretch, but it’s not an impossibility. If some well-meaning caregiver of a severely retarded child or immobile elderly parent leaves them under an AC’s outflow for hours and sends them to the ER with strange symptoms, the AC maker would want to be covered by such a warning.
I propose that in order to construct a hypothetical situation where a person’s life or death depends on the presence or absence of a stream of outflow from a normal household AC unit at conventional settings, one must necessarily posit that the victim has a medical condition so severe that it is going to be much more likely cited as the primary cause of death with the AC unit unlikely to be even noticed as a contributing factor. The cooling/drying is just not going to kill anyone who is not on the verge of dying from something else that’s a lot more conspicuous.
I worked with some very bright engineers from Japan who also believed that sleeping with a fan in your room could very easily kill you. Bright guys, good physics background, but no amount of questioning could get them to explain how it would kill you. Very strange.
Just a silly thought, but imagine a Korean bedroom that’s very small-most of them may be like that; I haven’t a clue- and the average Korean fan is fairly high-powered to cope with the steamy summer nights.
The Korean goes to bed under his stream of fresh air and the fan develops an electrical fault-it starts arcing and sparking.
This is miniature lightning. In nature the real thing makes a significant contribution to the formation of oxides of nitrogen, all of which are toxic to some degree or other.
Is it not feasible that enough NOx could be produced in a confined badly ventilated space to poison a human overnight?
A UI listed fan would not produce enough arcing. I doubt even the most dangerous, hacked together knock off could produce enough arcing.
Even if produced enough arcing to create noxious gas, the house would burn down due to an electrical fire before enough built up to smother the sleeper.