Air King 9220 High Velocity Fan | Revisit and Performance Discussion

Here is an Air King high-velocity air circulator fan. This is the model 9220 and this will be kind of a revisit, discussion, review type video. I bought this unit and the other three sizes, the 12, the 14, the 18, and the 20 back in the 2010s and I used the 12 and the 14 a fair bit. The two larger ones I never really had a use case for until I moved here. I did use the 18 inch one a fair bit when I first bought the house but I have not used the 20 over here yet, at least not that I can recall. This came up in conversation recently because Ed had brought over his Lasco piece of garbage all metal noise machine and the main failure point with that fan is the blade. So we thought maybe we should try to swap the blade from one of these into that box fan, which is really the way it should have been designed. I had the 18 inch model on site here but not the 20. So we swapped in the 18 inches blade but it was a little bit too small. So I went in, this was at the other location still, so I went and picked this up and next time he comes over we'll try to swap this blade into that fan which I think will be a perfect fit. But I figure while I have this out we will test it out because I've never really used it in a large room. And it gives a very different perspective especially when it's a fairly high volume air movement fan like this. So I figure we'll test it out in here, kind of get an idea of how how much air it moves, how it sounds, how it pushes the air across a large area and it'll give us an idea of how the two motors compare between the two fans and how this fan is in and of itself. I believe these are still under production but the prices are going pretty up, pretty high. I think that, if I'm not mistaken, these are upwards of $200 now which is quite a bit of money. There are, you know, curiously enough I think high velocity fans are one of the few things that have remained kind of decent over the years. You can get a high velocity fan for under $100 at this point and it would be fairly acceptable. Is this better build quality? Probably. Does it look nicer? Absolutely. Does it move any more air? I don't know. I think we'll have to do some more side-by-side comparisons. I think if I was to recommend a high velocity fan overall on today's market, I would go with the TPI series, the HVTE series. I think the model number for the 18 inch one is F18TE. That is an excellent fan. It is about as good as what we had back in the 90s. Let's take a closer look at this Air Queen or the Water Royalty high velocity fan. These blades are not perfectly rounded like the smaller versions are, but they're still a pretty old-school looking shape. Kind of like what Patton was throwing out in the 80s and I think Lakewood had a couple designs like this as well with the all-metal blades or with the round blades rather. This is a steel blade set and it is properly riveted onto a separate hub and aside from being horrifically out of balance, it's a very good blade set. Very well made, but the balance is is a serious issue and it's very widespread. I have four of these units and every single one is varying degrees of out of balance and I know a lot of other collectors that have bought these and have had the same commentary and I've even seen some comments in the reviews from the typical average user, you know, non-collector, saying that the thing shakes something awful during operation. This blade, I balanced it. That's what this is here. This is lead tape and I put that on there to add some weight to this blade. This particular blade weighed less than the other two causing it to shake something awful. I was able to get this one in pretty much perfect balance. I have not been able to perfectly balance any of the other three that I have, but I'm only using a lousy guess and check method which is very tedious and annoying. So at some point you just kind of improve it and leave it alone. This one just got lucky with selecting the perfect amount of tape. Here's the information tag. It is type 20HV model 9220. It's 1.9 amp motor which is a decent amount of current, but you know the older units, the Pattons and the Lakewoods, were 2.7 and this blade is much heavier so it's definitely not as powerful as the older units were. There's the information on the motor itself. Yes, it is upside down. So these motors are ball bearing motors and they're fully enclosed. I actually quite like these motors. I've been inside these before and you know they're they're not built as as tough looking as the you know the older Macmillan motors were, but they're pretty much the same as what's found in the Lasko box fans of today and you can say what you want about those fans. They're pretty much indestructible. They just run and run and run. So if the internals of this motor are comparable, which I'm sure it probably is, then chances are good this will have a very high hour service life and with the ball bearings the most common failure point I see in today's fans and even older ones is eliminated which would be the sleeve bearings either wearing out or locking up due to lack of lubrication and you know the additional benefit of the ball bearing is that if it does happen to wear out it's replaceable. Now I don't understand the design of the housing here with this huge plastic piece on it for a couple reasons. Number one, if this tips back on a concrete floor or this is probably going to shatter. This is it's made of that kind of very brittle feeling like shatter plastic type material and I feel like that's just going to break apart with any significant impact. The other thing I don't understand about this is the airflow. So you can see the motor there. The stator is exposed on the inside of the fan but almost the entirety of the end bell, so there's the front bell, almost the entirety of the end bell is inside this housing here and yes this does have vents but it only has one pair of vents so it has these vents but there's nothing on the inside so there is not going to be any airflow passing through, can't get a good picture of it, there is not going to be any airflow passing through this plastic housing. So the majority of the motor's cooling normally would come from the air rushing up against the back of the motor into the fan and that's been eliminated by this design. I don't know why Air King does this, it makes no sense to me. It's not something of recent times. Air King has been using this weird design for decades but I just don't understand it. I've never actually measured the motor's operating temperature. I've heard some people say that the motors run pretty hot. I wouldn't be surprised due to the lack of airflow over it. A pretty solid handle on top. It's a thick gauge wire, it's easy to hold. It's a very heavy fan, it's made of pretty heavy materials. Another design flaw is this stand and this is really dumb. So the way this works is if you want to take the front guard off for cleaning, you have to remove these two screws. When you remove these two screws, the fan detaches from the stand. So when you go to take it apart for cleaning, it just crashes apart on your table. Ridiculous. Years ago the stand would have attached to the rear guard and then you would have had clips around the outside which you just open up for easy cleaning. This is very stupid. I don't know why they did it like that. Very dumb design. And it's not a full 180 turn either. It cuts like that and it doesn't go down any further than that. Which is kind of annoying because if you want to use this to dry a floor, you can't push it down all the way. And again, I don't know what on earth the reasoning for limiting the range of this would be. There's no reason. If you just cut this tab off, which maybe I should just do that. If you cut this tab off here, there's no reason that this shouldn't be able to just do a full 360. There's nothing else that would block the movement. It wouldn't interfere. There's no reason that it shouldn't be able to go all the way around. So that's kind of dumb. The stand is stable enough. It doesn't want to tip back at all. It doesn't really want to tip forward either. It's pretty heavy. It keeps itself in place. It does have a nice long power cord. I'll give it that much. This is definitely longer than average. This is probably at least eight feet. It does have the infamous fused plug, which will keep us safe. It's grounded. It's a nice thick wire too. It's very flexible, very soft. Probably only 18 gauge. Yeah. But it's got a nice thick insulation. It's a nice power cord. And of course it just looks nice. It looks like an old school fan. The design on these, at least the general aesthetics design, I'm sure the motors have gotten weaker over the years, but the general design on these has not changed much over the years, which is usually a good sign. The design's not changing and it's usually because there's nothing wrong with it. Okay. So let's turn this thing on. I'm going to clip this second microphone onto the light here. So we'll be able to get a constant sound of what the fan sounds like. And I do have a kilowatts meter here. So we'll take an observation of the power consumption and so forth. We're going to be testing at 119.3, the volts. And we'll go over to the amps and we'll begin on low. That's kind of deceiving because when it's cold, it does have this nice gentle low to it, but give it a couple of minutes to warm up and then the low speed becomes quite fast. So perhaps we should probably do is start on high. And it does take a long time to get up to speed, which is a potential indicator that the motor is not quite as powerful as it should be, or is slightly overloaded. Not intrinsically, you know, a metal blade does, a steel blade, which is heavy, is definitely going to take more time to spin up. But compared to almost every other high velocity fan I've used, this takes a long time to get up to speed. But this one's in pretty reasonable balance, but again, only because I balanced it. It was totally out of balance when I got it, it shook something off. Blade pitch is quite steep. It's definitely pushing some good air. Let me move this over to the angle of the plants more. Pushing a good breeze over here, shaking the pictures on the wall. All this stuff is moving around. So that's only consuming 1.3 amps out of 1.9 and 154 watts, power factor 98. So 1.3 amps is really kind of weak for something like this. I kind of had suspicions that that rating on the motor wasn't right, because 2 amps is a lot of power. And from what I could remember, this didn't seem like it had that much power. It is loud, but it's not egregious. The amount of air push, I think it's a pretty reasonable noise level. It is somewhat disappointing though, I have to admit, because I think, I don't know if it's the shape of the blades not being completely circular or what, but the airflow doesn't really seem to carry that well. It kind of like disperses out to the sides. If I stand right in front of the thing about 10 feet away, I don't feel a lot of air. But if I stand out to the sides, I do feel a decent amount of air. So that's kind of an interesting flow pattern. From what I remember, when I tested all four together, it seemed like the 18 was the most impressive. It seemed like the 18 really had a good strong concentrated stream of air. Not that this isn't powerful, but when I think of a high velocity fan, I really expect a very forceful air stream. And this, yeah, it's moving a lot of air, but it's not like blasting me out of the way like the old pads do or like the TPI does. If I stand over here, this is what I was curious about. If I stand on the edge of the room, do I feel the air kind of recirculating around the room? The answer is not really. It's kind of an unimpressive amount of air moving around the fan that's not directly right in front of it. Well, let's go down to medium. It's pretty strong like right in front, but even just a couple feet back, it seems to dissipate fairly quickly. I really don't feel much difference in the airflow. I feel like there was just more noise on high than anything else. Yeah, that's good. I'll check the power information first, but it's 1.13 the amps, 125 the watts, power factor 92, and the load. Now, unlike a lot of other high velocity fans currently on the market, this does have a pretty good variance in the speeds. There's a significant difference between low, medium, and high. It's kind of tame enough on low that I would probably even use this in here on low. It's quiet enough. The airflow just doesn't deliver, and this is why I wanted to test it in a larger space like this because you can't really tell how it works in a small room. If I stand all the way across the room, it's probably about 15 feet away. I can feel a breeze out to the sides, but it's not very strong. I feel almost nothing straight in front of it, although some fans are like that. Yeah, the airflow is just kind of lackluster, which is unfortunate because I think this is one of the better quality high velocity fans you can get today, but I don't think it's the best performing. I would kind of put this more of like just a good quality residential grade fan in terms of performance. Oh, let's see the power information. That is one amp on the nose, 160 watts, power factor 88. I generally like these fans, and I do use these around the house, and I'm going to start using this one now too, but it just doesn't pack that typical high velocity fan punch like the older ones did or like the TPI still does. You're paying for a ball bearing motor, which is good. You're paying for a pretty heavy duty steel blade, which is, albeit, totally out of balance, which is unacceptable. You're paying for a pretty thick, I don't know if it's steel or aluminum or what the cages made it, but it's a pretty durable fan. It's going to take a lot of abuse, I think. This is not really flimsy at all, and the paint's pretty good. There's not a lot of imperfections on it. It just doesn't push the air like the old ones did, which is disappointing because these aren't cheap. It'll be interesting to see how this blade performs on the piece of garbage all-metal Lasko box fan. I'm sure it will improve the performance of that unit, but I don't know how much. It really put out some good air with the 18-inch blade, so we'll see what it does with this. I do overall like it, but it's kind of just for the price. I suspect, as long as you don't have one that is so out of balance it just shakes itself apart, I suspect it should have a pretty good service life. The major failure point is replaceable, but it just doesn't push the air like the old ones do.