Fan fix

The weather this past week has been unseasonably—even unreasonably—hot. I'm used to April temperatures in the sixties, seventies, even into the low eighties, but in the middle of the week it hit 89. (Global warming strikes again.) So I decided it was high time to get out my trusty desk fan. 

This yard-sale find has kept me cool for more than ten summers, but it's become a bit temperamental over the years. For the past couple of summers, it hasn't always started up right away after being switched on. More and more often, I had to give it a good thump to get it started. This was only a minor annoyance, so for a couple of years I just put up with it. But this year, I decided it couldn't hurt to open it up and see if I could fix the problem. When I couldn't find anything obviously wrong with it, I decided to give it a good cleaning and see if that helped. And rather than just wipe it down with a rag, I took Brian up on his suggestion to take it downstairs and try blasting out all its crevices with a strong jet from his air compressor.

In one way, this technique was quite effective. It dislodged a fair amount of dust and lint, and when we took the fan back upstairs and plugged it in, it started up right away. Unfortunately, it also made a loud rattling sound as it ran. This was a problem it hadn't had before; it had been slow to start, but once you got it going, it ran smoothly and quietly. So apparently, all we'd managed to do was replace a slightly annoying problem with a new one that was even more annoying.

At this point, Brian suggested that maybe the sensible thing to do would be to get a new fan. It had only cost us a buck or so to begin with, and it had served me for over ten years. And he'd already repaired it once, replacing the clip that used to hold it in place on the desk with a stand made from scrap wood. We'd surely gotten our money's worth from it at this point, and a new one wouldn't cost more than $10 or so. But my ecofrugal instincts rebelled. The old fan was still technically working; it was just a bit noisy. And since all we'd done to it was clean it, surely it couldn't have suffered that much damage. It ought to be possible to figure out what was causing the problem and undo it.

I watched the fan as it ran, and I figured out that the noise was coming from the blade assembly. When the fan started up, the rotor shifted forward a bit from its resting position, and apparently this was enough to push it out of its normal, quiet groove. We experimented and found that if we tilted the fan or pushed something against the center of the rotor blade to nudge it back into place, it quieted down. The problem was, as soon as we let go, it shifted back into its noisier position. So, in theory, if we could add something to the fan grille that would lightly press against the blade as it turned, it would keep it from shifting forward without stopping it from turning altogether. But what?

I spent the next half hour or so testing out various options. First I tried a wine cork, but it was a bit too long and wouldn't allow the grill to close. I tried shaving down the end with a rasp, but it took so long that I finally abandoned the idea. I tried mocking something up with a wad of cotton and some tape, but I had trouble getting it to stick. A cat toy in the shape of a spring seemed like it should be perfect, since it would automatically compress to the appropriate length, but the end of the spring rubbing against the blade assembly made even more noise than the rotor itself. After each failed attempt, Brian kept reiterating that, really, there was no shame in just replacing the fan, but I was too stubborn to quit. And here's what I eventually hit on.

That little purple thing stuck to the inside of the fan grill is an earplug. I attached it to the exact center of the grill with a dab of hot glue, then added a couple more dots of glue on either side to help hold it in place. It's just long enough to make contact with the blade, and the squishy foam material presses against it gently without impeding its rotation. With this damper in place, the fan is perhaps a bit louder than it used to be, but it's no longer loud enough to be disruptive. And if the earplug falls off or wears out somehow, I can always replace it with a new one.

So here's the big question: Was it really worth putting all this effort into fixing a $1 yard-sale fan? Or would I have been better off listening to Brian and getting a new one?

Well, the whole process—cleaning the fan, then tinkering around with it until I found a fix that worked—took around 45 minutes. The materials cost about 30 cents (25 for the earplug and another nickel or so for the glue and all the clear tape I used while testing various solutions). Buying the cheapest new desk fan at Target, by contrast, would cost about $8 ($8.55 with tax) and take around 10 minutes, assuming we were able to combine this errand with others in that same area. By taking 35 minutes to save $8.25, I effectively earned an hourly wage of $14.14—a lot less than I normally make, but still more than minimum wage. And since I was between work assignments at the time, it's not like I was losing any money by working on this little DIY project instead of my official job.

And that's assuming we would have had a chance to pick up the fan while running other errands. If we'd needed to make a separate trip to get it, the numbers would look even better. The round trip would take about 40 minutes and cost an additional $1.30 or so in gas, meaning I spent only 5 extra minutes to save $9.55—equivalent to an hourly wage of $114.60. Plus, of course, I kept the old fan out of the landfill and saved all the petroleum and energy that would have gone into the manufacture of the new one, as well as the fuel required to get it from the factory to the store to our house. And besides, it was fun.

I'll concede that putting this much work into repairing a fan I paid a buck for more than ten years ago isn't normal behavior. But as I've asked before, who wants to settle for normal?