Like everyone else I’ve seen the television ads for the Dyson fan and wondered how the thing works without fan blades. My cousin and I were recently discussing this very thing when we decided to do a little research on the topic.
After visiting a few customer reviews we discovered that there are in fact blades contained in the fan’s base. The air is simply channeled up through the round “air foil.” A couple of days later I examined a display model at my local Home Depot. The commercials have often described the noise generated by a conventional fan as unsettling. “The blades buffet the air creating a pulse, but the Dyson fan creates a constant stream of air…” or something along those lines. Sorry to say the noise level (if that bothers you), is about the same as a conventional, less sexy, general market fan. The air put out by the Dyson fan is not too bad, also about the same as her more average cousins. The Dyson fan is not a scam. For the most part it does what the manufacturer says it does. But nor is it, in my opinion, as cool as they imply either. There’s really no new method of moving air, as the design would seem to suggest. So what’s the draw? Well obviously its aesthetics. The Dyson fan looks like something you’d see sitting on Captain Picard’s desk, particularly the mat grey model with the blue air foil. But good looks are costly. The price on most models has come down to around three hundred dollars… yes down. So you’re looking at paying more than ten times the price of a more plain Jane Wal-Mart fan.
At the end of the day the Dyson fan is a cool product, however how much is your average consumer willing to pay for cool? As for me I’ll stick to my old school oscillating fan that I paid about twenty dollars for, even if it is unsettling.