Is it worth having a room-fan for a top-floor, hot, New-England bedroom?

October 1, 2018 7:52 AM

I think any fan would be too noisy for me to sleep with, so I'm wondering if it's worth getting a fan just to cool off the room before bed once temps go down in the early evening. Is it that much better than just having two opposing side windows?

(I realize it's not summer now in New England, but if it'd help in cooling, I'd buy the fan now for a "dry out the basement" project....)

posted by Jon44 to Home & Garden (8 answers total)

In my experience, a dual window fan like this is well worth the money. When it's cool outside, you can use the intake setting to pump that cool air into the room. When it's hot inside, you can use the exhaust setting pump that air out. When you just need a bit of extra airflow, you can put one side on exhaust and one side on intake to just freshen up the room a bit. Having a cross-breeze with two windows is helpful, but a fan like this is way more effective than the windows alone. Especially if you're not planning to sleep with it, this seems like a good buy -- just a little while with the fan on can make a big difference in the temp.
posted by ourobouros at 8:05 AM on October 1, 2018 [6 favorites]

By "room fan", do you mean a ceiling fan, a portable fan that plugs into the wall, or something else entirely? If something else entirely, can you link to a product that is the type you're considering?
posted by Johnny Assay at 8:05 AM on October 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

No.

Fans work by moving warm air away from you. You are walking around in a bubble of warm air that is you-shaped, very roughly a centimetre deep. The fan makes this air move away like stripping insulated siding off a house.

They also work by creating draughts so that the hot air can escape your house or room and cooler air if there is any can get into the space to replace it.

But if you run a fan in an empty room with a low ceiling and no ventilation the room will be every so slightly hotter at the end of the day because of the heat generated by the use of a motor.
posted by Jane the Brown at 8:17 AM on October 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

The only thing a fan in a closed room will do is cool the evaporating sweat off of you. But a big "Blow the hot air out of one window while the other one is open to let cooler air in" works. I have a hot New England bedroom and I can't really sleep with windows open. I have learned to sleep with a fan running sometimes or I just move downstairs to a couch if it's terrible. What sort of fan are you talking about?
posted by jessamyn at 8:23 AM on October 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

We sleep with a fan running. It is somewhat noisy but it's a white noise that becomes totally ignorable very, very quickly.
posted by BlahLaLa at 9:26 AM on October 1, 2018 [3 favorites]

The very best is a fan in 2 windows. You've got to get real airflow. One fan facing in- one fan facing out.
posted by beccaj at 1:56 PM on October 1, 2018

I hesitate to say this because people tend to understand their own sleep patterns better than anyone else, but whenever I have had to sleep with a fan it usually takes a couple of nights of getting used to the noise, but afterwards it's fine. It leads to a sort of playing chicken with the weather though: if at some point in the spring it's only going to be hot for a day or so and then get cool again, there's no point in turning on the fan yet.
posted by quaking fajita at 2:48 PM on October 1, 2018

Honestly a tiny air conditioner is relatively inexpensive if you only use it to cool down the room before you go to sleep. We're done the fan thing upstairs, and they are in the basement now waiting for a disaster involving water.
posted by Kalatraz at 6:44 PM on October 1, 2018 [1 favorite]