Updated: Dyson Reinvents the Humble Fan Comments

A rather cool piece of tech!

Now all I want to know is when will we have dyson case fans, dyson chipset fans and dyson grapphics card fans :)

I thought the same thing Keldon. Put this tech to use rather than to cool people off. Isn't it a bit silly to launch this product now? Didn't anything remotely resembling "summer heat" end like a week ago? That's a long time to have a £200 fan sitting doing nothing.

It's like they studied aeronautic engineering and played with F1 engineers for a few years and hey presto - a fan ?!? Very nice piece of tech i admit, and i would definitely get one if they didn't cost so much (or rather if i didn't earn so little)

Keep at it Dyson - you'll be taking on Intel next ;)

"So how does it work? The answer is rather ingeniously (and possibly in part by magic). The air multiplier silently draws in air behind it then amplifies it through the ring by 15x to produce a cool and continuous flow of 405 litres of air every second. This is all powered by a brushless motor and the air speed can be precisely adjusted with dimmer-switch controls rather than the usual two or three settings on regular fans. It's a bit like Stargate! "


You merely describe WHAT it does, again. Not HOW it works. How do you go about "amplifying air"?

Indeed Keldon: Currently encoding video and my computer is deafening! Would love one or two "fans" like these in my PC. Would be a dream come true!

Someone correct me if I'm wrong...but didn't Dyson do his bit for this country by closing his plant here and moving things to Malaysia? Or am I thinking of someone else?

There's no mention of how quite/noisy these things are- any idea? Forget the hazards etc of normal fans- the one thing I hate is how bloomin' noisy they can be!

If it's anything like his vacuum cleaners, it'll start off great, get noticeably worse after a couple of years, then die prematurely..

Hmm, a back-to-front vacuum cleaner...HOW MUCH?!

To be honest, the humble £5 desktop fan was probably the last thing in the world that needed a new approach. This is nothing more than a ridiculous design exercise that's a complete waste of money. I 'll take one.

he could have just reinvented the jet turbine engine as we know it. birds shall no longer fly in fear of being sliced and diced. and public hovercars may be a reality, without the headless bits.

Oh very Wizard of Oz, the fan is no doubt hidden in that suspiciously circular base.

I wonder what they're using to force the air out of the ring in the right direction and at an even force all the way round. Is there a fan ring hidden away in there? Is it pressurised?

Any chance of TR getting hold of one to disassemble? If you're doing cars then you can definitely cover a fan.

http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/27887/how-dysons-air-multiplier-works

here is the link for all you die hard fans to know how it works in alien languages...

I wonder if there is a line in the manual saying: do not position against a wall otherwise it wont work... lol

LOL! £199 for a fan! good candidate for con of the year. Does it have Bang & Olufsen branding on it?

It's a bit like Stargate! if you use a standard dhd put in required 7 symbols this will take you too p4579 home of the Asgard who left all their technology to humankind about 3 years ago before being wiped out by the replicators Dyson obviously has access too this no seriously its a circular aeroplane wing and a brushless motor is effectively a linear motor which is why it is silent just dont stand too close as the event horizon creates

Thanks xbrumster :)

still thinking i could attach two of them to my backpack and take off...

Dyson products are technologically very cool, even if expensive. As long as they work, which they rarely do. Lord knows how much I have had to pay for replacement parts for their bagless vacumns. I switched to a £30 Panasonic hoover and the only cost I have to pay are replacement bags. They cost much less than silly parts.

Being a Dyson, it's bound to be cool (design) and crap (build) at the same time.

Also, being a Dyson, it's bound to be under-powered. How effective is this compared to a conventional fan of the same size?

I hope they don't make it in garish colour schemes like some of their other products.

And the price, don't even get me started ....

If the Air Blade is anything to go by this will be very cool. Still get all excited every time I see one in a toilet.

@ colin, hahahahhahahaha! Love the Stargate analogy.. I bet u Mr Dyson's the one who's been using the wormhole technology to stash all our precious water on the moon!

Hmmm regardless of how it works, £199!! Rearrange this popular sentence " plot-the-lost-James-Dyson-Has" ?

Ive heard of added value but this is sounds like another (Sir) Clive Sinclair in the making...

Which kind of begs the question: how much _would_ you pay for it?

I love gadgets, yet I'd struggle to see myself paying more than £20 for it, so how on Earth can they expect people to pay 10 times more than that for something that moves air particles around in a slightly different fashion to existing air-moving solutions?

as with most of dysons products, application of existing technology. check out how emergency slides for large aircraft fill their emergency shutes, they use an air amplifier.
The famous dyson vacuum was a copy of a sawdust collector i had for 50years attached to a commercial sanding belt.

it won't work if you place it too close to a wall, so it couldn't be used as a CPU cooler just as the main intake and exhausts.

15 times ay....what does a normal fan achieve? That might be good, or complete rubbish. For 200 squids I'd better actually get cooled.

@Gordon

I think the comparison with Bugatti is a little inaccurate because the Veyron appears actually to be built using quality materials. I am impressed with Dyson design (if not their Fisher-Price inspired colour schemes) but I think they have more in common with cars like the Renault Espace and Citroen C6. Great to look at, innovative solutions but woeful quality compared to more sober and often cheaper rivals.

If Dyson could build like Miele, Numatic, World Dryer and the other marques they fit with price wise, people I'm sure would have more love for them.

Of course it would work inside a computer, as cpu cooler, or any chipset cooler. The fans sit on top of finned heatsinks, so air *can* flow. Save your comments to things you know about!
As for this gadget - i want one. But I'll never pay that much. Maybe i'll make one - the video shows everything you need to know to replicate it.

Why is everyone getting so excited? This isn't some wonderful new cooling technology, it's a fan hidden in a box. Let's say that again, it's a fan and it's hidden. There is a fan in this thing. You can't see a fan in a fan heater, but there's one in it.

I do like how he manages to make uncool things cool though, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, hand driers, and now fans....not exactly rock'n'roll stuff.
Imagine what he could do if he started with someting already cool and dyson'd it, dyson laptops or mp3 players or phones. Don't like to think about the price though!!

@Mark - That is a very plebian view of the Dyson fan. Essentially it is an overkill of technology on the humble fan that we have had enjoyed on very hot days. (not that many in a year). This IS a wonderful cooling technology, perhaps not for the hot gpu/cpu, but for the person using it!

Come on, a shopping trolly is not the same as a Lambo, both have 4 wheels but one of them is a super feline magnet.

I'd pay £50.

I don't see it replacing computer fans.

And what's with the comparing fans to cars thing? In fact, let's stop comparing laptops to cars as well...

@Ed: I haven't criticized this for not being an invention or not complex enough. I am pointing out that the bladeless fan actually has blades in it. If I marketed a device with an led hidden in the base routed through a lightguide to the front I'd hardly have made a lightless torch. This is little more than the magician's art of misdirection applied to a product.

@Ed: Not quite, it moves all 15 units of air itself. It's not turning on any magical air tap that blows all the other air without using your electricity. Instead of using fan blades to push the other 14 air units it's using the 1 air unit the plastic and metal bits come into contact with as essentially part of the mechanism to push the other 14 units.

It may well save energy because of the lower turbulence (which is wasted energy).

@Ed: This whole 15x thing is a bit of a misnomer. Yes, the volume of air that goes through the base and out of the ring is 15 times less than gets blown out towards someone's face, but it gets blown at a far higher speed. The extra 14 units of air don't come along for free - they are drawn through friction/pressure which comes at the expense of the speed of the initial air flow. There is nothing inherently much more efficient about this. I don't know how long the air jet from the ring stays laminar, but I doubt that it's so long that it gives a huge efficiency boost.

What ultimately matters is how much electricity it uses vs. what volume of air per unit time it displaces compared with a normal fan. And we don't have that information, though I'd be willing to wager it's pretty similar.

@ Mr Patel

The airblade was actually a bit of a con in terms of innovation. It's great, but the technology has been drying hands in Western style washrooms up and down Japan since the late 90s.

Kudos for marketing it so successfully in the UK, but no marks for innovation on that product.

@Ed I think you should check your physics out.

And this fan has twice the output http://www.amazon.com/Air-King-15-Inch-3-Speed-9515/dp/B0007Q3RTS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1255467420&sr=1-1
of a quarter of the price.

@Ed: Have I misread here, why are you assuming that a normal fan is 1:1? This can't be right as the same principles of inducement apply to the air that leaves the fan, and acts to 'move' more air than actually passes through the fan blades.

@Ed To start with, in all the ways listed by all the other comments.... you just seem to have read a press release and quoted directly, without really thinking about it.The implication is that the dyson is 15x more efficient, its not.

How's it relevant that you can get twice the output for quarter of the price. You really can't see how that is relevant ?

@jopey You seem to have forgotten the other hemisphere...

OK then @Ed, the follwing quote, aswell as not being grammatically correct, is baloney "A normal fan achieves a 1:1 ratio - all the air it moves is the air is physically moves. The fan in the base of this device moves 1 unit of air but through air friction and the bernoulli effect 15x as much air moves through the ring. As such it should save energy."

Why in the world will this save energy. You think the dyson fan converts "one unit of air" into "15 units of air" - just like that, thats the whole calculation. You'll probably be impressed by the boys over at www.steorn.com - they get energy out of NOTHING.

It looks nice, its probably a half decent fan. But thats it, its a pretty fan.

@Ed

OK, I see you have realized the previous error of your ways and have just started making numbers up:
"it's probably more like a 20:1 ratio. This dyson fan maybe reduces that to 5:1. I'd definitly be interested to know exactly how the two types of fans compare, though."

OK, I'll make some numbers up as well. 99% of people will buy the dyson fan because it looks nice, 87% will buy the fan becuase they think it is technologically superior. 100% of these people will assume it is "more efficient" because the marketing is clever - people like you. I would be very very suprised if this desgin is more efficent than normal propellor designs. The dyson design has been around for years, and all boats (where efficiency really does matter) still use the traditional propeller design, not the dyson desgin.

This news item has generated nearly 50 comments so far - amazing. Just goes to show that there is a little of the mad geek in all of us!

I can't believe I didn't say this sooner!
*clears throat*
Well, I've looked at the press release and viewed a few videos, but I must confess... I'm not a fan!

@Gordon: I'd have gone for that one, but I think at the moment at least 2 people are waiting around corners to 'get' me if I utter the "F" word again...

Meh, My tower fan at home seems good enough for the job, not a fan either. ;)

Although I think if mine could tilt upwards to give me cool air too rather than my legs or me lying face flat on the floor, then maybe that could help.

The build quality those look cheap and suspect, I doubt for £199 you'll get a 10 inch Dyson fan that will last for many months, let alone years, cheap grey plastic alert.

This has certainly generated a lot of confusion! (mainly by misleading marketing stats by Dyson).

The only metrics that mean anything, are :
1) How effective this is at cooling a person at a given distance per kW.
2) How effective this is at cooling a person at a given distance per dB.
3) How cool does it look per £ I've spent.

All this magicing of 15-20 units of air out of the ether and fanless efficiency is smoke and mirrors.

I suspect (although I would quite like to try one) that it delivers poorly on all three metrics.

ps. This will never work for boats due to the incompressibility and high viscosity of water.

£200? I bought a 9000btu (split) air conditioner for £250 some 6 years ago for our living room, self installing it wasn't fun, but a year later we bought another for the lounge for £200.

The 'amazing' thing is that they 'cool' the air too, as for this £200 'fan', well the plastic bladed £15 pedestal fans served us well before the air-cons, and are now used during summer in the bedrooms, the noise they make is uniform and helps mask traffic noise at times.

Oh, last but not least, I'm not a fan of Dyson products, two vacuum cleaners died, out of warranty, how remarkable. Bought a Sanyo, which is now seven years old, works a treat. Admittedly the Sanyo bagless clearer was probably one of the many clearners produced in response to the Dyson cleaner revolutionising the market with bagless cleaners. I don't see this fan doing the same.

Just supporting what Furbian said - I bought a 12,000 BTU from B&Q this year, and they gave me 15% off that too.

Now I know they are not the same thing, but hey, I'd have the air-con anytime to cool a room.

A bonus is that if anybody asked me the price, I'd take great pride in saying that it cost me only 170 quid.

Try saying that about this fan.

Innovative - probably. Cool - for about 5 minutes. Practical - no.

Do I lust for one - no at all.

I think we should all chip in for just one of them and donate it to the Science Museum.

I thought the most important thing about this was that a young child wouldn't cut its fingers off when it stuck its hand in it. Or at least not until it worked out what screwdrivers and big rocks were for.

lol @ paper cannon. You could also try throwing paper planes back through the stream to prove who's the king of paper folding aeronautical design.

It may look striking or bizarre, but it doesn't look anywhere near as cool as a classic chrome desktop fan. And it also fails on price and probably reliability (due to the extra complexity). Most of Dyson's products tread the fine line between looking science-fictiony and looking plain ugly (e.g. the big orange balls and twisty plastic moulding on the vacuum cleaners).

drdark: I agree, I really wish we should stop comparing everything to cars. Car analogies are annoyingly ubiquitous yet totally unhelpful and inappropriate in 99% of cases. In other words if analogies were cars, the car analogy would be a Land Rover... Oh damn.