EnviroFan 136F-7 36" Extra Heavy Duty Industrial Ceiling Fan in the Living Room

The Envirofan 36 inch model 136F installed here in the living room. This is a super cool install and I definitely think that the first triple install should be three of these. I think three of these would really look amazing in this room. It'll be a start to the triple install configuration. Unfortunately, performance wise, this is every bit as disappointing as I remember. If not worse, it just hardly moves any air. Standing directly underneath it here, I can feel a fairly steady amount of air coming down, but it's a very narrow stream, which I wasn't expecting because of the curved blades. And it's not very strong. I think in terms of air circulation in here, the Boston Harbor unit did a better job by a kind of significant amount. I'm going to shut it off here. It doesn't respond well to this control at all. So it's like you have full speed, medium on the control, which I couldn't even tell a difference between that and high and low is like just a touch below high. So there's pretty much no speeds. This is not going to be a full demo video. I will re-install this and do a full demo video once I have a better control set here. This control set is not helpful for this fan at all. It's a shame it doesn't move more air because you can tell it's a very good quality product. It runs perfectly smooth. There's no shake, no vibration, no extraneous noises. The clock on the blades is almost perfect. It's a really good quality fan. It just doesn't move much air. And I don't think it's supposed to by design because if you look at the spec sheet, it only claims to move 3000 something CFM. It's not a particularly powerful fan and that actually would would prove my observations about the Boston Harbor unit because that one is about 3500 CFM. So these might move about the same amount of air. I think this was 3200 CFM if I'm recalling correctly. I had to look back on the computer at the spec sheet. A low speed around here would look really cool. And I can achieve this speed with those stacco controls perfectly silently, which of course will put the stacco controls in here eventually. Tripod, come on, get it together. I like that these look so much older than they actually are. The design on these didn't change much over the years at all. That did stop kind of abruptly, but this has very little use on it at all. I had this in the computer room for a pretty short period of time and I didn't get a lot of use out of it in there. I think I had installed it towards the end of the year when it was already getting kind of cool out anyways. So this does work in here at this height because it's above the beam. So this is the same thing as with the Beacon Hill. When I'm in here, I can see it on top of the beam, so that works. And it's really a cool sight because I remember so many instances seeing these types of fans out in public with ceilings like this or some kind of situation where it was kind of hard to see the fan. So to have a setup like this is very nostalgic. Yeah, three of these kind of look so cool. 100% that's got to be the first setup we do in here. Absolutely. Now if I had three of these, the airflow would probably be adequate, but with the one it just doesn't quite cut it. It's a very warm breeze that comes down from this and it stays warm. Normally when I run the fan on high, the breeze eventually becomes pretty much ambient temperature, which would imply that it's pretty much circulated the entire room and de-stratified all the heat. The draft under this stays warm most of the time, which would lead me to believe it's not really pushing all the heat down, or in other words the heat is going up faster than they can push it back down. So I really kind of wonder what the practical use case is for these things if they're this weak. The Dayton one blows this out of the water. The Dayton one I would say moves many times over the amount of air that this does, but this looks much cooler than the Dayton. This looks like it could have been straight out of the 80s. I'll turn it back on now. I already feel it getting kind of cold in here. I'll put it on low, but you probably won't even be able to see the difference in the speeds. And low is already too fast. This is such a cool install. I can't wait to put three of these in here. It's going to be incredible. I would attempt it now, but there's no point because once the Christmas tree is there, I'm not going to be able to have the fan there anyways. It wouldn't fit. So there's really no point in trying to do it before Christmas. So that's a little low, which on this control is a joke. There's the medium. So it's fast and full. That's medium and that's high. There's very little difference between medium and high. It's hard to tell how loud it is with the wood stove running. You can definitely hear it, but it's not egregiously loud. Although for the amount of air it's moving, it's definitely pretty loud. Because the Boston Harbor unit was nearly silent and it moved at least as much air as this, It's just the performance is kind of lackluster. And if I was to really rely on these to de-stratify the heat, I would need all three of them. But the quality, I mean, look at the clock on the blades. It's almost perfect. It's very rare. There's no shake. It runs perfectly smooth. It's a great fan. Great quality fan. I do feel like these are higher quality than the Dayton's, but there's no doubt that the Dayton is a higher performing unit. All right, I'll turn the the spotlights off so you can see what it looks like with just the chandelier and the lamps. And then of course we'll come back tomorrow and get some pictures of it tomorrow morning. Actually, no, I'll attach the microphone to the tripod here. See if we can get a better audio of what the fan itself sounds like. All right, hopefully that captured some good audio of the fan. I'm getting a little nervous getting too close to it because I can't really see in this lighting. Exactly where the blades are. I don't want to chop up the camera and the new microphones. This is what it looks like in this lighting. I'll turn it off again. In this lighting, it looks cooler going slow because you can see the shadow on the ceiling from the chandelier here. Now I think that the 56 inch one uses about the same downrod length. I don't think there's a big difference between the two. So perhaps it will hang high enough that it will be acceptable. It seems like there's two levels that are satisfactory here. There's this height, which is very close to the ceiling. And then there's the two foot downrod, which is kind of at the level of the beams. But when it falls in between there, it's just not right. And that's where the Dayton falls on the shorter rod. It's not quite high enough to clear above. And this is pretty cool too with the shadow in the back. I remember seeing them like that sometimes too. Oh, I can't wait to get all three of these. And this is right around the low speed I like. 20, 25 RPM. Perfect. I'll flip it back on for a minute and then we'll go around the room. This is the best we can do for a nice low speed right now until I get a better control set up. Moving kind of quick, but we're going to run out of spin down here. I don't think we'll use that as a thumbnail. That's pretty cool. All right. So I'll come back in the morning and we'll take some pictures of it in daylight. And then we're going to swap this out for the crest. It's the next morning, beautiful, bright, sunny day. Unfortunately, it's still bitter cold out, but at least it looks nicer today. And we have good lighting to film this. I lowered the stove down and I turned that blue fan off for this segment so we can get a better idea of how it sounds. And it really is quite noisy. Now, the sound is similar to the Dayton in the sense it's kind of an odd like chopping, whirring kind of noise. It's not distinctly like, oh, that's a fan. And I think that's part of why it's perceived as so loud. But unlike with the Dayton, this is kind of loud for nothing. You know, the Dayton was noisy, but it was absolutely blasting the air out. If I go into the kitchen here, it's a background noise, but I can definitely still hear it. And it's just not moving all that much air to rationalize all this noise. So let me get the airflow tester out here so we can see how it compares. I really think that this is about as powerful as the Boston Harbor unit was. And quite frankly, the specifications support that. Now, this doesn't work that good with ceiling fans. And since I can't get it that close to the fan, I don't even know if this is in the frame or if it will show anything useful. But you can see the air is moving, and it's moving at a pretty good pace. But the airstream is just so small and so concentrated that it's not particularly effective. Now, the Dayton's airstream was also small and concentrated, but the force behind it was ridiculous. This, it's pretty gentle. The Beacon Hill outperforms this by a significant amount. And so we'll do the same test as with the Boston Harbor. If we put this on the floor here, this is just a couple feet away from the fan. Seems like it's a little bit more of a steady breeze than the gustiness of the Boston Harbor. These plants are moving. This is moving a little bit. It's very comparable to the way the Boston Harbor was. So now if we come over here by the couch, this is what I was most interested in. Do we get the air kicking up the couch? We do, but it's very, very little. This was kind of pronounced with the Boston Harbor but not so much with this one. This is kind of lackluster here. There's definitely a couple gusts here and there that will kick it up, but it's not not a whole lot of air. Let's see, right here. Yeah, there's, I mean, this is almost zero. So when I'm sitting here now, I, yeah, I don't really feel anything. That's pretty disappointing. So airflow wise, this unfortunately does not impress. Let's see if we come over here. This tree was definitely shaking a little more, I think, with the Boston Harbor. There's definitely air moving here, but it's not much. And do we feel anything kicking up at the computer? Actually, yes, there is a little bit, but it's not an impressive amount. It kind of comes and goes. I'm trying to set this up to grab as much air as possible. Very, very subtle amount of airflow over here. Not much to speak of at all. Anything going up against the wall? It's kind of fizzling out by the time we get to the edge of the wall here. So, you know, it really does not, does not even meet expectations, let alone exceed expectations in the airflow department. In fact, it's quite disappointing. And in this case, it's not like this is undersized for the room, because these are not spec'd out like residential fans are, where a 36-inch fan would be good for 100 square feet or something like that along those lines. These are spec'd to a very large area. I want to say these are supposed to be good for 1,000 or 1,500 square feet, so quite a large area. And this is only 500, and it's not doing much. It's just a shame because it looks so awesome in here. But I think once we get to three, that should give us enough airflow to make it a useful installation. As far as air coming in from the other room, which I was able to feel with the Dayton, I don't really feel anything. I can't even really detect air moving. It's just stagnant. I wonder if these have gotten weaker over the years. I feel like the older ones were stronger than the old 36-inch ones, because quite frankly, even if you just stand directly underneath it, it really doesn't feel like anything more than a basic residential fan. I feel like the Minuet 2 could make this much airflow. I'll go ahead and shut it off so we can kind of see what it's like when it's running a little bit slower. Unfortunately, I still don't have the correct speed controller, same issue as last night. I wonder how the 56-inch one's going to look in here. So I have a white one, 160F or whatever the model number is, which makes no sense. And I also have one extra brown one from the garage order because the first order of the garage ones, one of them was defective. So I got a second one sent out for free and they didn't want the first one back. So I still have it. I have no idea what's wrong with it, if it's bad bearings or a machining defect, but it seems to lock up at some point along the stator. And I'm wondering if perhaps I can just replace the bearings or if we need to go in there with a Dremel and shave something down or whatever, or quite possibly just run it and it'll free up by itself. I don't know. That one does not have the motor shape that I remember. The white one has the motor shape I remember at the grocery store, but the brown ones that I have in the garage, the motor is kind of more like this, where it's got a flat part on the bottom and it's at a point. So I would definitely have more nostalgia to the white one that I have, but the brown one would look better. Now I believe that I can still get the white one in black and it will probably have the same shape motor, but that's out of budget for this year unfortunately. So we're kind of stuck with the ones I have. I suppose what I should probably do is paint one of the white ones that I have brown and use that in here because that'd be pretty cool, but probably not going to happen this year. You can see the spin down improved a fair bit. It didn't stop abruptly at the end because now it had a good break-in period last night. It ran for probably 10-12 hours on high last night. So very cool install. It looks amazing, but the performance just does not impress. It doesn't even really satisfy. It kind of actually is disappointing.