Are Bladeless Fans a Scam?

I measure how much power and wind speed is generated from a bladeless fan vs a regular fan.

[TheActionLab]

Yes, volumetric flow rate would have been better to measure, but there is no really good easy way to do that. I just chose fans that had very similar cross-sectional area. So the cross-sectional area of the bladeless fan, including the entrainment hole, was similar to the yellow normal fan area. In fact the yellow fan was slightly bigger. So that means it moved more air faster than the bladeless. Not a perfect test, but it was pretty easy to see, just being in the room that the normal fan using the same watts moved more air faster than the bladeless.

[Flyingdinosaur]

I'll be honest. That bag filling trick blew my mind more than it should have

[garrysekelli]

Dyson also built a giant sphere around a star so I wouldn't underestimate his abilities.

[catkeys]

The "bladeless" Dyson fan is what I call a Rube Goldberg fan. It accomplishes air movement in a way that is a lot more complicated (and expensive) than it needs to be.

[ujang]

Finding a fan blade in a bladeless fan is like finding battery in a perpetual motion machine

[donotthecat]

Ty for not making this video 20+ mins, and history of fans. Just straight to the point 👍

[andonel]

I thought people liked bladeless fans because the stream of air was more pleasant than the beating fins of a traditional fan. I never understood why it was exponentially more expensive just for that small benefit tho.

[YoungGandalf]

Bladeless fans are like perpetual motion devices. They seem magic at first glance, but it's all just a deception.

[LuMaxQFPV]

Dyson's marketing has always given me a great chuckle. He has been brilliant at promoting clever design as "revolutionary science". lol.

[CaptainRon]

A friend of mine bought one of the large floor standing Dyson fans. First thing I noticed was how loud it was compared to the amount of wind it produced

[xraytonyb]

I'm not sure if anyone else brought this up, but in order to test the wattage used by the first bladed fan in your experiment, you want to put the wattmeter between the variac's output and the fan. This way, you are not also reading the power consumed by the variac itself.

[phdnk]

You could have measured the thrust that the fan generates to estimate its absolute performance. With anemometer you'll have to integrate the airspeed over the entire cross-section of the airstream.

[ChrispyNut]

The only real advantage I perceive with them is safety, but that's a huge stretch with the weak ones. The larger, genuinely useful ones it becomes a factor, but even then, fan grills make normal fan designs pretty safe, so it's only covering the 0.1% cases, so 99.9% of the time, a normal fan's not going to cause any problem. Though a finer grill on a traditional design would cover that 0.1% whilst still providing greater air flow and pressure.

[JustWastedHoursHere]

There actually are truly bladeless fans called ionic fans, but they can only move a very small amount of air by comparison. Sharper Image had one for sale years ago.

[Thxsober]

Bladeless fans, a way to take a $25 fan and turn it into a $125 fan that doesn't work as good as the $25 fan.

[AgentOrange]

I always thought a bladeless window fan would be cool. I don't know if the geometry scales, but being able to still let in light and see outside would be pretty cool.

[antonioalbeldaochoa]

For efficiency you should compare volume of air per second, as speed can be increased by flowing air though a smaller gap

[jmavierpayne]

I always thought the benefit was the slim profile you get a lot of air movement with a very very small footprint. Secondly, a benefit I figured was also the safety with children/pets

[lucasgarcia]

-buy bladeless fan
-look inside
-blades

[charlesje]

Maybe the most common lie in product marketing boils down to: "This products uses less energy than it really does."