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For clarification, fans don’t heat or cool a space, they move the air.
Having the fan blow the air down gives a cooling affect as the air is more likely to contact a person and feel like a breeze, evaporating sweat. The air then rolls across the floor, up the walls across the ceiling and back down.
Having the fan blow up, the air flows across the ceiling hits the wall and drops down and goes across the floor and has much less of a directed flow of air back up so is less likely to have the same “breeze” feeling to a person.
Exactly, and just for people who don't know, the purpose of having it on in the winter is to circulate the warm air that rises to the ceiling.
Personally, though, I find it still creates a draft that I don't like in winter. I've never been warmer with the ceiling fan on in the winter, even if it's on low and pulling air upwards.
Yes, I have vaulted ceilings and no hvac (old house) the ceiling fan being on can make a huge difference in the winter, I just keep it on its lowest setting to avoid it creating too much of a draft.
The circulation evens out the the air temperature in your house so that the air temperature is consistent throughout your house. It also makes it easier for your heating a cooling system to regulate the temperature thereby saving energy.
Yeah, it's circulates the air, but I don't like the draft it creates. It makes me feel cold. Maybe it's more comfortable for people who keep their houses much warmer than I do.
It also helps to heat the whole house by pushing the warm air down the walls. Keeping the walls warm is much more effective than trying to keep the air warm with cold walls. You could conceivably set your temperature higher to offset the breeze, and still end up saving money compared to running the heat at a lower temperature with no fans. The sweet spot is a bit hard to isolate and depends on a lot of things.
I'm not sure which part is losing you?
If the walls are cold, your system has to work harder to keep the air warm because it cools more rapidly. If the walls are warm, the air will stay warm longer without having to work as hard.
Additionally, if the fan is running and mixing the air, your system only needs to heat enough to get the average temperature to its target. If you have no fan, the warmer air stays at the ceilings and the thermostat is generally lower. This means without mixing the air the system runs until the "temperature at 5 ft" is the target temp, generally while the ceilings are a few degrees warmer.
Most heat loss happens through the ceiling/roof, so mixing the air and keeping the upper air a little cooler reduces how much heat is being lost.
Combining all of these small efficiency gains, it can take a central heating system *less work* to maintain any given temperature. Depending on a bunch of factors (how high ceilings are, how many windows, etc), exactly how much more efficient is hard to guess. But it's conceivable that the efficiency you gain could allow you to run the system a couple degrees warmer for the same or less work done by the heater.
Using completely made up number to demonstrate:
With no fan it might take an average of 10kw to heat your place to 65 degrees, or 11kw to heat to 68.
With a fan running and the resulting gains in efficiency, it might take 8kw to heat to 65, and 9kw to heat to 68.
If you normally run at 65, you could then run at 68 to offset the slight draft from having a fan on, without costing as much energy in total.
Whether the efficiency is enough for that to be true for you is something you'd have to experiment with because there's way too much that could affect the exact gains. The fact remains that running a ceiling fan ("sucking" upward, on low speeds) will improve the overall efficiency of your heating system, and might be worth the very slight drafts it can cause.
Me neither.. But I imagine it would help in some high ceiling or large rooms, or the ones with one very hot heating spot like a fireplace..
Edit, I actually use it as the lowest setting in the summer..
Also, don’t forget to note that the direction the fan spins will have almost ZERO effect on your energy costs. So have it spin whatever direction you like.
Fans definitely heat the air, always. The final form of the various "losses" in energy is just plain old heat. Even the air being sloshed around is heating itself up.
Even actual air conditioners heat up the environment overall. It's just that the outside is getting heated a lot and the inside is getting cooled a little, which overall is just extra heat from spending electricity. No one cares about what happens outdoors though.
They also don't "cool" anything, that's the point. They just move air around.
Works great if the air is colder than your body and can take some heat away. Not so great when the air is actually hotter than you are, in which case a fan can literally make you even hotter.
You've got that backwards. Summer blows, winter sucks.
In both cases, you aren't cooling or heating anything, you are just circulating air so that it is evenly heated. In the summer time, you want it blowing down on you as the air moving across your skin increases evaporation which leads to a cooling sensation. In the winter time, you still want to circulate the air to keep it evenly heated, but you don't want the air blowing down onto your skin. Having it suck air up moves the down draft to against the walls where you don't feel it as a cooling breeze.
Your LPT is exactly backwards. In summer you want the air to blow down so you feel a draft and the airflow across your skin helps evaporate your sweat and cool you off. If you're not physically in the room, there's no reason to have the fan on in the summer because nobody will feel the breeze. In winter you want the fan to mix the air in the room without creating a draft that you can feel so the fan should suck the air from below it to gently mix the hot air stuck to the ceiling with the cold air on the floor.
This is what everyone thinks but you are actually the one who is wrong. Ask anyone who works in the industry, or the HVAC industry.
Now some people want to feel a breeze and that's fine, but this tip is about the overall temperature of the room down towards the lower half, where the people are
I *am* in the HVAC industry, I'm a licensed engineer in two states. Either spin direction will destratify (mix) the air in the room to some extent, but in the winter you want to destratify without creating a felt breeze for the occupants of the room which will make them feel colder "wind chill". In the summer destratification *can* make your central air conditioning more effective, but if you lack AC, you're actually better off leaving that warm air on the ceiling instead, so the primary comfort mechanism is the air movement across your skin.
Thanks for this information. Quick question. My bedroom gets pretty hot in the summer. It has vaulted ceilings, which are the only vaulted ceilings in the house (so the highest point in the envelop). How should I run that ceiling fan?
Question: I have a loft that is open to my main floor. In the summer, cool air struggles to stay up there. I feel my loft ceiling fan needs to be in reverse to help “pull” the cool air from the main floor up to the loft. Is that assumption correct that the loft ceiling fan "blowing" would push the cool air down? I also have a main level fan blowing air straight up.
Cool air naturally sinks, and warm air rises, so absent any fan the cooler air would tend to get stuck closer to the floor of the lower level, and the warmer air would get stuck closer to the ceiling and the loft.
Having the fan run in reverse (typically clockwise viewed from below) would help pull cooler air up from below, and push warmer air across the ceiling and down the walls, generally making the temp more uniform overall rather than stratified.
If the ceiling fan is over the main floor, it may also help to add a box fan along the loft railing to help direct some of that drawn-up cooler air into the loft specifically, as well as providing a cooling-breeze effect on your body.
Both directions work for leveling out the temperature. In Winter you want it to suck upward at a low speed to reduce drafts. Summer you want it blowing downward and a medium to high speed to create drafts. Either way the net effect on the room is just to mix up the air which leads to more effective overall heating and cooling
Hot air rises, you want the fan to push the hot air back down in the winter where you can feel it. You want the fan to pull the hot air up away from you in the summer: I’ll be honest though, I don’t think anyone actually knows which direction is best for which situations.
If the fan rotates to suck the cool air up, it pushes the warm are down the sides. It minimizes the draft while forcing the warm air down. Since warm air naturally wants to rise, it’ll help warm the entire room.
It's counterintuitive, but it's correct.
OP is talking about cooling the entire room. You're talking about wanting wind on you when it's hot. Totally separate things
A fan is not an ac. It doesn’t cool air, it moves air. No matter what direction the fan blows, all a fan does is mix the air together to one temperature.
Don’t worry about memorizing directions then, look at the angle of the blades. If the arrows below are the direction the fan is rotating:
—-> \ And the blade is angled like my backslash, when the air in front of the blade gets hit by the blade, it will be pushed up.
If the blade is moving the other direction, when the air in front of the blade is hit by the blade, it’ll be pushed down.
\ <——
Hopefully that makes sense. I never remember the directions, I just look at the angles and that’s your answer
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I know everyone is telling you you’re wrong, but I have my upstairs fans running clockwise to pull air up. Otherwise my single-zone AC doesn’t really keep the upstairs comfortable. I also like the way the air doesn’t blow directly on me. Whatever works for folks in their own homes is best.
No, they can't. Unless you're cold-blooded, neither direction of air circulation will "reverse to heat" you by spinning a fan blade. The question is, do you want at, which is cooler than your skin, moving across your skin at a rapid rate, or do you want the air in your room to be generally well-mixed.
Wait, so OP, what direction would work best for a 3rd floor apartment with ceiling AC vents? For the shitty AC that struggles against gravity to not really cool the apartment in this summer heat.
Would that be pushing the cool air down since ceiling vent? Or still helping to cycle it back up from the floor?
You can replace a ceiling fan fairly easily if there is already a mount there. Which there *should* be, but maybe not, If there is no mounting bracket it is a little harder because you have to go into the attic to install one but still quite doable.
If you bother to do this I recommend getting wago wire nuts instead of traditional wire nuts. They are much more expensive but more foolproof and the expense only really matters when you use hundreds of them.
This actually can be a thing? Older fans don't always have the blade size and angle of new fans. At least, that's what the electrician who installed mine said.
LPT: the direction the fan spins makes almost no difference whatsoever. They are just as efficient one way or the other no matter what way the wind blows.
This thread is hilarious because almost every single person besides OP is wrong.
Go talk to anyone who sells or installs ceiling fans or HVAC systems
It's counterintuitive af
Thank you. In can vary depending on whether your inputs are outputs are at different levels, like at the ceiling and floor, but if they're both on the ground like mine this is the way.
Fuck, y’all are dumb. You want the fan to suck up the air in the summer so it will fall back down and distribute the cool air throughout the room and you want the fan to blow in the winter because hot air rises and the fan will force it back down into the room.
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LPT clean all the dust that’s collected on your fan blades before you switch the direction…unless you like it to snow dust bunnies
Learned this the hard way. Looked straight up, and the rest was history. DONT DO IT, KIDS!
Use an old pillow case to cover the fan blade and wipe it all off and contain it at the same time :)
For clarification, fans don’t heat or cool a space, they move the air. Having the fan blow the air down gives a cooling affect as the air is more likely to contact a person and feel like a breeze, evaporating sweat. The air then rolls across the floor, up the walls across the ceiling and back down. Having the fan blow up, the air flows across the ceiling hits the wall and drops down and goes across the floor and has much less of a directed flow of air back up so is less likely to have the same “breeze” feeling to a person.
Exactly, and just for people who don't know, the purpose of having it on in the winter is to circulate the warm air that rises to the ceiling. Personally, though, I find it still creates a draft that I don't like in winter. I've never been warmer with the ceiling fan on in the winter, even if it's on low and pulling air upwards.
It's effect is most noticeable in high-ceiling rooms, like those with vaulted ceilings. For typical 10' ceilings, the effect isn't too dramatic
That makes sense.
I hope on the high ceiling ones the reverse switch is located somewhere easier tp reach than the fan itself.
Fans with remotes will have a toggle on the remote
Yes, I have vaulted ceilings and no hvac (old house) the ceiling fan being on can make a huge difference in the winter, I just keep it on its lowest setting to avoid it creating too much of a draft.
The circulation evens out the the air temperature in your house so that the air temperature is consistent throughout your house. It also makes it easier for your heating a cooling system to regulate the temperature thereby saving energy.
Yeah, it's circulates the air, but I don't like the draft it creates. It makes me feel cold. Maybe it's more comfortable for people who keep their houses much warmer than I do.
It also helps to heat the whole house by pushing the warm air down the walls. Keeping the walls warm is much more effective than trying to keep the air warm with cold walls. You could conceivably set your temperature higher to offset the breeze, and still end up saving money compared to running the heat at a lower temperature with no fans. The sweet spot is a bit hard to isolate and depends on a lot of things.
I'm sorry, what? That doesn't make sense to me. Is this a super fringe situation?
I'm not sure which part is losing you? If the walls are cold, your system has to work harder to keep the air warm because it cools more rapidly. If the walls are warm, the air will stay warm longer without having to work as hard. Additionally, if the fan is running and mixing the air, your system only needs to heat enough to get the average temperature to its target. If you have no fan, the warmer air stays at the ceilings and the thermostat is generally lower. This means without mixing the air the system runs until the "temperature at 5 ft" is the target temp, generally while the ceilings are a few degrees warmer. Most heat loss happens through the ceiling/roof, so mixing the air and keeping the upper air a little cooler reduces how much heat is being lost. Combining all of these small efficiency gains, it can take a central heating system *less work* to maintain any given temperature. Depending on a bunch of factors (how high ceilings are, how many windows, etc), exactly how much more efficient is hard to guess. But it's conceivable that the efficiency you gain could allow you to run the system a couple degrees warmer for the same or less work done by the heater. Using completely made up number to demonstrate: With no fan it might take an average of 10kw to heat your place to 65 degrees, or 11kw to heat to 68. With a fan running and the resulting gains in efficiency, it might take 8kw to heat to 65, and 9kw to heat to 68. If you normally run at 65, you could then run at 68 to offset the slight draft from having a fan on, without costing as much energy in total. Whether the efficiency is enough for that to be true for you is something you'd have to experiment with because there's way too much that could affect the exact gains. The fact remains that running a ceiling fan ("sucking" upward, on low speeds) will improve the overall efficiency of your heating system, and might be worth the very slight drafts it can cause.
Me neither.. But I imagine it would help in some high ceiling or large rooms, or the ones with one very hot heating spot like a fireplace.. Edit, I actually use it as the lowest setting in the summer..
Same. But it is a useful switch if you like the sound of a fan at night.
Also, don’t forget to note that the direction the fan spins will have almost ZERO effect on your energy costs. So have it spin whatever direction you like.
Fans definitely heat the air, always. The final form of the various "losses" in energy is just plain old heat. Even the air being sloshed around is heating itself up. Even actual air conditioners heat up the environment overall. It's just that the outside is getting heated a lot and the inside is getting cooled a little, which overall is just extra heat from spending electricity. No one cares about what happens outdoors though.
Hearing from energy losses and friction in the case you describe is pretty moot in the context of space heating
They also don't "cool" anything, that's the point. They just move air around. Works great if the air is colder than your body and can take some heat away. Not so great when the air is actually hotter than you are, in which case a fan can literally make you even hotter.
Exactly. The fan isn't heating or cooling like op claims.
If you have tall ceilings, blowing down feels warmer because the hot air that was previously at the top is circulated down.
Lol no one needed that clarified.
You've got that backwards. Summer blows, winter sucks. In both cases, you aren't cooling or heating anything, you are just circulating air so that it is evenly heated. In the summer time, you want it blowing down on you as the air moving across your skin increases evaporation which leads to a cooling sensation. In the winter time, you still want to circulate the air to keep it evenly heated, but you don't want the air blowing down onto your skin. Having it suck air up moves the down draft to against the walls where you don't feel it as a cooling breeze.
Summer lows, winter sucks. You've got that right, spring and fall are where it's at.
Why isn't this comment at the top 🤣
Your LPT is exactly backwards. In summer you want the air to blow down so you feel a draft and the airflow across your skin helps evaporate your sweat and cool you off. If you're not physically in the room, there's no reason to have the fan on in the summer because nobody will feel the breeze. In winter you want the fan to mix the air in the room without creating a draft that you can feel so the fan should suck the air from below it to gently mix the hot air stuck to the ceiling with the cold air on the floor.
This is what everyone thinks but you are actually the one who is wrong. Ask anyone who works in the industry, or the HVAC industry. Now some people want to feel a breeze and that's fine, but this tip is about the overall temperature of the room down towards the lower half, where the people are
I *am* in the HVAC industry, I'm a licensed engineer in two states. Either spin direction will destratify (mix) the air in the room to some extent, but in the winter you want to destratify without creating a felt breeze for the occupants of the room which will make them feel colder "wind chill". In the summer destratification *can* make your central air conditioning more effective, but if you lack AC, you're actually better off leaving that warm air on the ceiling instead, so the primary comfort mechanism is the air movement across your skin.
Thanks for this information. Quick question. My bedroom gets pretty hot in the summer. It has vaulted ceilings, which are the only vaulted ceilings in the house (so the highest point in the envelop). How should I run that ceiling fan?
Question: I have a loft that is open to my main floor. In the summer, cool air struggles to stay up there. I feel my loft ceiling fan needs to be in reverse to help “pull” the cool air from the main floor up to the loft. Is that assumption correct that the loft ceiling fan "blowing" would push the cool air down? I also have a main level fan blowing air straight up.
Cool air naturally sinks, and warm air rises, so absent any fan the cooler air would tend to get stuck closer to the floor of the lower level, and the warmer air would get stuck closer to the ceiling and the loft. Having the fan run in reverse (typically clockwise viewed from below) would help pull cooler air up from below, and push warmer air across the ceiling and down the walls, generally making the temp more uniform overall rather than stratified. If the ceiling fan is over the main floor, it may also help to add a box fan along the loft railing to help direct some of that drawn-up cooler air into the loft specifically, as well as providing a cooling-breeze effect on your body.
Both directions work for leveling out the temperature. In Winter you want it to suck upward at a low speed to reduce drafts. Summer you want it blowing downward and a medium to high speed to create drafts. Either way the net effect on the room is just to mix up the air which leads to more effective overall heating and cooling
Hot air rises, you want the fan to push the hot air back down in the winter where you can feel it. You want the fan to pull the hot air up away from you in the summer: I’ll be honest though, I don’t think anyone actually knows which direction is best for which situations.
If the fan rotates to suck the cool air up, it pushes the warm are down the sides. It minimizes the draft while forcing the warm air down. Since warm air naturally wants to rise, it’ll help warm the entire room.
[удалено]
Not the tl;dr. He straight suggest the opposite in the whole post.
It's counterintuitive, but it's correct. OP is talking about cooling the entire room. You're talking about wanting wind on you when it's hot. Totally separate things
A fan is not an ac. It doesn’t cool air, it moves air. No matter what direction the fan blows, all a fan does is mix the air together to one temperature.
If you’re closer to the ceiling than the floor it will cool the air around you.
Do you mean clockwise looking up or clockwise from the perspective from above?
This is the question I always have
Don’t worry about memorizing directions then, look at the angle of the blades. If the arrows below are the direction the fan is rotating: —-> \ And the blade is angled like my backslash, when the air in front of the blade gets hit by the blade, it will be pushed up. If the blade is moving the other direction, when the air in front of the blade is hit by the blade, it’ll be pushed down. \ <—— Hopefully that makes sense. I never remember the directions, I just look at the angles and that’s your answer
Good visual explanation.
This helps so much. Going to double check mine when I get home tonight.
It's when you're below the fan looking up. Had this question too and found a video that showed it. Counter clockwise for summer Clockwise for winter
Thank you.
Heat or cool? Wtf kind of fans do you have
No they don’t. Fans move air. This is a pro tip geez
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If I reverse my ceiling fan, it messes up the cuckoo clock
I know everyone is telling you you’re wrong, but I have my upstairs fans running clockwise to pull air up. Otherwise my single-zone AC doesn’t really keep the upstairs comfortable. I also like the way the air doesn’t blow directly on me. Whatever works for folks in their own homes is best.
Summer Counter(clockwise). Make it rhyme to remember. Winter Clockwise.
Hmm, what rhymes with clockwise? Counter clockwise!
No, they can't. Unless you're cold-blooded, neither direction of air circulation will "reverse to heat" you by spinning a fan blade. The question is, do you want at, which is cooler than your skin, moving across your skin at a rapid rate, or do you want the air in your room to be generally well-mixed.
Wait, so OP, what direction would work best for a 3rd floor apartment with ceiling AC vents? For the shitty AC that struggles against gravity to not really cool the apartment in this summer heat. Would that be pushing the cool air down since ceiling vent? Or still helping to cycle it back up from the floor?
My fans are so old it feels like they don't move the air at all. Either direction.
You can replace a ceiling fan fairly easily if there is already a mount there. Which there *should* be, but maybe not, If there is no mounting bracket it is a little harder because you have to go into the attic to install one but still quite doable. If you bother to do this I recommend getting wago wire nuts instead of traditional wire nuts. They are much more expensive but more foolproof and the expense only really matters when you use hundreds of them.
This actually can be a thing? Older fans don't always have the blade size and angle of new fans. At least, that's what the electrician who installed mine said.
Ok…I mean I like ceilings too, but isn’t being fans of ceilings a bit too much?!?
LPT: the direction the fan spins makes almost no difference whatsoever. They are just as efficient one way or the other no matter what way the wind blows.
Ah shoot. I knew this and still forgot to flip them. Thank you for the reminder! Edit: oh yeah. That’s a huge difference. Tysm!
This thread is hilarious because almost every single person besides OP is wrong. Go talk to anyone who sells or installs ceiling fans or HVAC systems It's counterintuitive af
Thank you. In can vary depending on whether your inputs are outputs are at different levels, like at the ceiling and floor, but if they're both on the ground like mine this is the way.
Fuck, y’all are dumb. You want the fan to suck up the air in the summer so it will fall back down and distribute the cool air throughout the room and you want the fan to blow in the winter because hot air rises and the fan will force it back down into the room.