Is this fan hard to fix?

May 22, 2020 11:55 AM

I’m living at my sister’s house, and the ceiling fan is really shaky and makes a knocking noise when turned on. How easy is this to fix? If it’s an easy fix, I’m going to ask if we can do it, but I don’t want to ask if it’s hard.
posted by ocherdraco to Home & Garden (8 answers total)

According to this video, it looks pretty easy.
posted by essexjan at 12:02 PM on May 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

First step is to tighten the screws that hold the blades to the blade irons, and that hold the blade irons to the fan. If everything seems level after that, but it still wobbles, then you could get a balancing kit and try that.

The bracket that holds the fan to the ceiling box probably has little rubber feet on it, and as it moves it’s lifting them off and then hitting the ceiling. You could try to tighten that part of it up, but you won’t be able to access it without taking the blades off (and maybe taking most of the fan apart), so try that first.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 12:16 PM on May 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

Locate the fuse(switch) box, and then figure out which circuit controls this light. Label as you go, for future sake. Switch the circuit off during repair attempts.
posted by theora55 at 12:21 PM on May 22, 2020 [4 favorites]

It looks like it could be that the fan blades are not balanced, but first make sure it's hung up properly. There's weight kits that stick to the top of the fan blades to get them balanced.
posted by ikea_femme at 12:49 PM on May 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

As posted above - there are lots of cheap / free / easy things you can do to try and fix it. Tighten everything up, get a fan balancing kit and mess around with that. If that works - and it probably will - great. If not, you're not out much money or time.
posted by true at 1:20 PM on May 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

Our ceiling fan wobbled terribly but I experimented and found that placing a large binder clip at the end of one blade made the issue much less severe. If your fan has four blades, you can also try removing one pair at a time, to see if you can isolate the problem blade.
posted by Rash at 3:23 PM on May 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

Oh wow, that's really loud and annoying! This is probably pretty easy to fix, or at least "fix" so it won't keep bothering you. I'd say the best thing is probably to tighten things down first, like the links others have posted do, then try adding weights to balance the blades if that's not enough. But if you just want a really quick fix, try clipping a little extra weight onto one blade at a time and see if that improves it, like Rash described. Any weight will do; you could tape some pennies to the top of the fan blade and that would work. Longer term it's better to make sure it's properly installed, secured, and balanced with proper equipment, but if this is just about letting you get a cool breeze without driving you nuts right away, you can probably balance the fan with just about anything.
posted by biogeo at 8:48 PM on May 22, 2020

My parents had a fan that did that and it was actually loose in the ceiling attachment somehow
posted by ArgentCorvid at 6:03 AM on May 23, 2020