Paphos Life

Your ceiling fan is something you generally regard as something that is either on — and set to one of the three or so speeds — or off. It moves the air around your house to keep it from feeling too stagnant or to help cool you off without running your air conditioning too much in the summer.

What you may not have known, however, is that you can control the direction in which the fan rotates, which completely changes how the fan works. Here's how and why you should change your ceiling fan direction.

Which direction should your fan run?

Just below the blades on your ceiling fan's motor housing, you should see a switch. If you turn the fan off and flip this switch, the fan will reverse direction. This is so you can alter how the fan works at different times of the year.

If your fan has a remote, it might have a button to reverse the direction of the fan blades on the remote.

Summer

In the summer, the fan is meant to cool, so you'll want it to push air down. This forces the airflow to hit you directly, causing a cooling, wind chill effect. For this to happen, the fan should be rotating in a counter-clockwise direction.

To check this, stand underneath the fan and check which way the fan blades are rotating. If they are rotating clockwise, turn the fan off, wait for it to stop spinning and flip the switch.

Winter

In the winter, you likely don't want cold air blowing on you. A downward draft from a ceiling fan can make you feel up to 8 degrees cooler.

When you want a warming effect, you should switch the direction of the fan to clockwise. Instead of pushing cool air down, it pulls it up, which forces the warm air near the ceiling (remember, heat rises) back down.

For this, the fan should be rotating clockwise. Stand underneath to check the direction. If it's rotating the wrong way, turn the fan off and flip the switch.

To be fair, this trick doesn't specifically have to be used in the summer or winter. If you ever want to make a room feel warmer or cooler, reversing the direction of the fan will allow you to make small changes to the apparent temperature without relying so much on your expensive air conditioner or furnace.

Thanks for the tip. It does indeed make a difference - never used the switch before.

A.

The fan above my bed is just too cold, even on lowest speed, blowing straight down, so I have it blowing up. The air travels around the room, hits the walls and bounces back on to me. Much more pleasant

My fans are metric (rather than imperial ) they push air down when clockwise it seems.

A.

Hudswell wrote: ↑Fri Jul 27, 2018 11:43 pm Fans are cr*p....all they do is blow the hot air around...if the air is hot.....they don't cool anything...just circulate the air...! If it's hot it's hot...Aircon! And fans...perfect!

So why do they put fans in cars in front of radiators if they have no effect. Perhaps you should tell all the motor manufacturers they have been wasting money.

Have to disagree with Hudswell. Our ceiling fans are on all day when we're at home, without the aircon, and it definitely makes a difference. I wouldn't be able to sit at this laptop without the ceiling fan operating above me. Mind you, it might depend upon the size of the fans. Ours our particularly large.

We usually have our fans on in the hot weather. The one in the bedroom is on all night. Of course they make a difference..

If your fan is crap it needs servicing.

ronk wrote: ↑Sat Jul 28, 2018 10:48 am from Wikipedia:
" The breeze created by a ceiling fan speeds the evaporation of perspiration on human skin, which makes the body's natural cooling mechanism much more efficient.
Since the fan works directly on the body, rather than by changing the temperature of the air, during the summer it is a waste of electricity to leave a ceiling fan on when no one is in a room unless there's air conditioning, open windows, or anything that can heat up the room (such as oven) and fan is just to move air around."

Exactly.

So far this summer we have had A/C on in the lounge about 3 times in the afternoon and once in the night for about 1 hour. The rest of the time we are managing with floor and ceiling fans, quite comfortably (and healthier and cheaper) than A/C.