I know it’s the wrong time of year to talk about portable fans but I recently purchased this for upcoming spring and summer camping and, of course, couldn’t help but fiddle with it. That said, it’s also useful for emergency power outages which is another big reason why I bought it.
Upon initial un-boxing, I was pleased. It’s looked fairly solid, though made of plastic, and was relatively lightweight (without the batteries). Speaking of which, it can be run on both a provided AC power cord or eight (8) D-cell batteries… yup, I said eight batteries, which is something to keep in mind before buying. Since I knew that going in I didn’t care but I do need to stockpile more D-cell batteries.
As my interest was for use without AC power, I immediately opened up the battery compartment and proceeded to insert batteries; there was no need to read the directions… it’s all self-explanatory. I should say that the innards of the fan battery compartment were a bit flimsy for my liking, including the battery compartment cover/latching system. In fact, the fan did NOT work the first time I used it using batteries only and I thought… yikes! Does it even work at all?
I quickly tried it with the AC cord and the fan worked just fine. So, I fiddled with the batteries (swapped a few) and found it to work properly, but I was a bit disheartened as I don’t want my sole portable/emergency fan to be that finicky. Just be sure everything was ok, I let the fan run on low for about a half hour with the batteries and never had any additional trouble. I then removed the batteries and let it run using the AC cord for about a half hour again without any complaints.
I then wanted to see how much airflow it produced so I subjectively compared it my standard Honeywell AC fan and found that, in general, this fan produced about as much airflow on the high setting (it has both a low and high setting) as my Honeywell fan did on the low setting (it has three settings). You might think that to be a bad thing but I’m not complaining since the Honeywell fan puts out quite a bit of airflow even on low. That said, it would be nice if this O2 fan put out a bit more airflow but then we would be sacrificing battery juice.
The fan does have an ability to tilt–the battery compartment folds down–if you like but seems to stand just fine on a table without doing so. I can see how folding down the base would help to stabilize the fan if outside in the grass but haven’t tried that feature.
There really isn’t much else to talk about. Overall, I would suggest it’s a descent fan for camping or emergencies. There are some concerns, such as the seemingly flimsy battery compartment and the fact that it uses eight D-cell batteries. I should also mention that this is the newer model 1054. There are older models that are less expensive but also supposedly less durable, efficient, etc.
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