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To the Engineer that Designed my New Fan
After as much research I feel like doing, I can’t tell exactly where you are. I am going to go out on a limb and say that you are in China, where these things are made.
This source says the sellers have quality inspectors and a lot of other employees over there doing supplier quality work. It doesn’t say who the designers are.
I see that you have the “UL LISTING” mark on your packaging. Too bad you didn’t include the required reference number so I can look you up.
Chances are you were a little kid the last time I was over there, and I am sure things are a lot different. But, in the interest of giving you customer feedback, I’m going to tell you about the fan you sold me.
FYI in case you may not be aware of the marketplace over here. I’d say that
less than 10 percent of the ceiling fans in the US are installed by the same
person who bought them. The bulk of them are installed by some contractor, who
is an immigrant, or some poor nagged domestic partner.
Thanks, by the way, for including some instructions for the immigrant.
Yes, I said him. I would also estimate that this is because 90% of these
fans are installed by a male.
Some of us live in crowded apartment blocks, but mainly, we live in houses. Some fraction of these lovely fans are going into pretty old houses, in fact.
You, on the other hand, put a lot of instructions into your little instruction booklet about how to install a junction box, attach it to a stud, in a new house. But I didn’t need to do that.
I had an already existing bracket from an old ceiling fan I had in the same spot.
Did you make your bracket a standard size so that it would fit where I needed it? No you did not. This caused me a lot of problems, when I tried to install your bracket into my pre-existing hole.
Oh, yeah. Your wiring instructions were good, for someone that is doing a new installation into a spot that just had a light before. This would be a three-wire electrical line. Black to black, white to white, and the ground is the ground. Blue wire on the controller goes to the blue wire on the fan. No problem.
Your remote control switch, by the way, was very clever. Can you make the box a little smaller? I would have loved more room for my wiring. I figured out the only way to install it is the way you suggest, into the bracket.
Mine box had a red wire. I know you can’t anticipate every scenario, but this one should be common enough. What to do with the red wire? It’s the hot wire from my second pre-wired switch. Nothing in your instructions gave me this seemingly useful information.
It’s true, that we Americans are not as handy as we used to be. Half of us are female, and their gift is not normally light electrical work. Half of the males under 40 grew up in a home without his biological father. That’s our prime fan-buying age.
Why that is important to you is there was no one to throw them the wire cutters and black tape and say “put in that light switch” when they were kids. There are two generations of young gentlemen who have never wired in a light.
So I am going to go out on a limb and say that your assumption was that a contractor or electrical whiz, or subcontractor from the Big Box Store was going to do it.
I gotta tell you that in an ideal world, that would be fine. But in the real world that is not fine. It is hard right now to find somebody reliable. I am around the modern labor force all the time. I am not really blaming them, it’s not their fault. But some big fraction of the labor force right now is not capable of successfully installing a fan.
You should know who the installer is, and adjust the instructions accordingly.
I should also tell you that this is not completely dead. It’s just being applied differently. Instead of specializing in manufacturing, and improvising, we are inventing financial management instruments, and doing day trading.
Day trading pays better. Manufacturing is not for everybody, nor is electrical engineering, nor is being an electrical contractor.
I figured out the red wire. It’s the hot wire from my second switch. I wired it into the controller’s AC input/black wire. Eventually.
The bracket for the remote. I did like the idea of the remote, for the job I was doing. It is not much of a remote compared to the TV and small enough to get kicked under the sofa.
My new fan is up now. it does move a lot of air, for the size that it is, and thank goodness it doesn’t vibrate the whole house when I turn it on.
