Woody & Ted: "The Ceiling Fan Incident"
Posted: Friday August 10th, 2007
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You know me. I'm fond of sharing my home improvement experiences with you guys. I mean, who could forget the notorious Evil Toilet? Or the Bathroom of Dispair? Now we have the Ceiling Fan of Doom!
Our house isn't a large one, but the living room has a vaulted ceiling that angles up from 10 to 20 feet to meet the loft area where I work at my computer. Well the loft, even with the computer off is several degrees hotter than the rest of the house. It's your typical household thermal dynamics. With the vaulted ceiling and loft all of the heat from downstairs is filtered into my work area.
Well, one of the ways to help with this is to get the air moving. And what better way to do this (without spening 10 thousand dollars rerouting intake vents and the AC registers) than to toss up a nice ceiling fan. So that is the route we took.
Sitting at right around the 14 foot mark though, we were supposed to install one that had a remote. Otherwise you have to pull out a ladder any time you want to change the fan speed. So Taks ordered a fan we both liked. But though she thought it was a remote model it was not. No big deal though it's easy enough to install a rheostat slider at the wall. This left us with having to squeeze a 14 foot latter into the living room so I could hang the thing.
Now 95% of the job was easy. Assembly, hanging, wiring, etc. probably took about 30 minutes. But when it came time to attach the lighting unit to the bottom of the fan, everything went ugly. Poor design left several pieces butting against each other making it exceedingly difficult to screw everything together with one hand. I threw my hat. I banged on the ladder. I had to take a break. Finally I just muscled it into place (bending the rod that hold the light dome in the process).
In the end the new fan moves air like a monster. All that's left to do is banlance the thing. We've returned the 14' ladder already. But it would just get in the way, not allowing the fan blades to turn, anyway. So, I'll be doing the balancing the ceiling fan from the top of an 8 foot ladder. Wish me luck, and keep your fingers crossed that our couch doubles as a reasonable crash pad.
[ discuss ]
Our house isn't a large one, but the living room has a vaulted ceiling that angles up from 10 to 20 feet to meet the loft area where I work at my computer. Well the loft, even with the computer off is several degrees hotter than the rest of the house. It's your typical household thermal dynamics. With the vaulted ceiling and loft all of the heat from downstairs is filtered into my work area.
Well, one of the ways to help with this is to get the air moving. And what better way to do this (without spening 10 thousand dollars rerouting intake vents and the AC registers) than to toss up a nice ceiling fan. So that is the route we took.
Sitting at right around the 14 foot mark though, we were supposed to install one that had a remote. Otherwise you have to pull out a ladder any time you want to change the fan speed. So Taks ordered a fan we both liked. But though she thought it was a remote model it was not. No big deal though it's easy enough to install a rheostat slider at the wall. This left us with having to squeeze a 14 foot latter into the living room so I could hang the thing.
Now 95% of the job was easy. Assembly, hanging, wiring, etc. probably took about 30 minutes. But when it came time to attach the lighting unit to the bottom of the fan, everything went ugly. Poor design left several pieces butting against each other making it exceedingly difficult to screw everything together with one hand. I threw my hat. I banged on the ladder. I had to take a break. Finally I just muscled it into place (bending the rod that hold the light dome in the process).
In the end the new fan moves air like a monster. All that's left to do is banlance the thing. We've returned the 14' ladder already. But it would just get in the way, not allowing the fan blades to turn, anyway. So, I'll be doing the balancing the ceiling fan from the top of an 8 foot ladder. Wish me luck, and keep your fingers crossed that our couch doubles as a reasonable crash pad.
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