Warm a room with a Ceiling fan!?

Warm a room with a Ceiling fan!?

A ceiling fan can warm a room! Hang on, what? I thought fans were designed to cool rooms? At least I did until I started specialising in ceiling fans. All my experiences of ceiling fans had been large fans on a ceiling, spinning at 800 miles an hour, sending a blast of cool air down across the room below. Great in the summer time but gathering dust and cobwebs in the winter. Well to my surprise I learnt that this was not the case. Not everyone apparently realises that a fan can actually warm a room and it’s all to do with your central heating and science.

The winter brings with it the cold both outside & inside your home

Our central heating and all other types of heaters for that matter are great at warming a room. They kick out lovely warmth but, because of pesky nature, the heat wants to rise up as fast as it can. In rooms with high ceilings this can be really inefficient. It happens all the time in conservatories and places like that. It’s one of the reasons a conservatory can feel very cold in the winter even if you have your heating on! The heater will warm the air immediately around it but then rise up and get trapped at ceiling level leaving a cold corridor of air below, where you happen to be sitting.

Warmth from central heating is often lost through it rising and being trapped at ceiling level leaving a cold corridor below

This is where Fantasia ceiling fans come in. A UK ceiling fan manufacturer, based in Kent, who have designed their ceiling fans with this very situation in mind. You see, Fantasia realised that if a fan was spun in the opposite direction it would actually move the air of a room in a different way.

Instead of blasting air downwards which was drawn from the sides of the room, reversing the blades motion recirculates the air above the fan, which is where the hot air is trapped. If the fan was set to reverse and put in to slow mode (gently spinning around) then it basically recirculates that hot air mixing it with the cold below and raising the temperature of the room.

Instead of forcing air down rapidly a slow running fan in reverse draws air upwards and pushes the hot air down the sides repeating the process and gradually helping warm the room by mixing the hot air with the cold

With that in mind Fantasia Ceiling Fans build a reversing mechanism in to pretty much all of their fan models. The standard way to do this and the way most of the range operate is to find the little reversing switch on the side of the motor housing and flipping the switch. The reason the switch was placed on the fan itself was to ensure the blades would not be spinning when you selected reverse mode & thus damaged the motor. (The blades wont be spinning if you’re up there between them!).  The reverse switch only really needs activating once for the autumn / winter and once back again to normal for the spring.

The reverse switch on a Eurofans Belaire fan puts the unit in to reverse mode

Later models such as the Viper Plus fan has the reverse feature built in to the remote control handset. Pressing the reverse button actually slows the fan down to a stop and then starts it up again in the reverse direction. This option is particularly good for fans to be installed in very high ceilings such as barn conversions, which also happen to be the kinds of rooms that warm air rises up to!

The Fantasia Viper Plus fan has a reverse feature built in to the remote control handset

So there you go. You learn something new everyday (unless of course you already knew that!). A fan in reverse wont massively heat a room but it will certainly stir up the air and force that warm air back down again helping to take off the chill and making your heating more efficient. Judging by the weather outside my window right now that cant be a bad thing! So that’s how you warm a room with a ceiling fan!