68" Hampton Bay Altura Ceiling Fan in Oil Ru bbed Bronze | Living Room Installation

Hello viewers, today we're going to be taking a look at this absolutely massive 68 inch Hampton Bay branded Altura ceiling fan in the oil rubbed bronze finish with five medium walnut blades that the box claims to be hand carved. I was hoping to record this on a day that was not cold and not windy so I could turn off the stove but unfortunately it's cold and windy and this is the day I can record it so here we are. The reason why I wanted to turn the stove off is because the the heat drafting up from the stove significantly impacts the performance of the fan to such a degree that I'm going to turn this off and we're going to watch this actually spin backwards from the heat of the stove drafting up to the fan. Now keeping the remote in the frame so I don't get accused of reversing it. Okay see there it goes is now spinning backwards so that is how much air, how much current the the air from the stove actually creates in the room and this is why I run the fan on forwards not on reverse. There's a lot of people that come in this box and and say things about this room and the way that the cooling and heating works and those people have no idea what they're talking about because they've never been in the room and experienced the way that it works in here. Because the stove is fan forced the heat pushes out from the stove and it doesn't start going up to the ceiling until around the middle of the room where the fan is and if you put the fan on reverse you just take the heat right back up and it's pointless. So I run the fan on down because as soon as the heat starts to go up into the fan the fan pushes right back down to the floor and that's the the most effective way to reclaim the heat that I've found. Now this the stove is not running very hot right now because the sun is coming in the in the windows. I can calm it down a bit for the afternoon hours but when that stove is really running hot this will spin almost as fast as it does on high backwards if I turn it off. So the stove makes a very significant difference to the performance of the fan and that's why I wanted to shut it off so we could better analyze the performance of the airflow. I will turn the stove off or the the heat exchanger fan off briefly for certain periods of this video so we can better assess how the fan moves the air. I guess I'll do that now so we can take some close close-up shots of the fan while it's not running. So we're only going to have a couple minutes there before the temperature gets too hot in there and then the stove will turn the fan itself turn back on. Whatever, just don't worry about it. Oh man. So here's the unit. Let me just stop this with the camera. This is quite a nice looking fan. These blades have a very nice warm almost a reddish tone to the wood. The finish is nice. This is a very aesthetically pleasing fan. I got some comments from people that were saying they were surprised that I picked this and those people are correct. This is not normally the styling that I would go for. This is much more modern than what I prefer. That having been said, I can appreciate newer designs in a room that just look decent and this is one of those situations. A lot of the comments I said about the Quick Connect, I would say about this as well. This has a much more modern design to it. You can tell this is probably at least from the 2000s, not any older than that, but it's from before the time period when interior design just completely deteriorated to the junk. This has nice rounded edges everywhere. Even the blades are not perfectly straight. They have rounded, they're kind of um, ovular almost. They have nice rounded edges. The motor is very rounded. Everything is round. We'll just call those nuts for now. The blade screw nuts are round. The housing is very rounded and also like the Quick Connect, it's not intolerably plain or bland either. The canopy has a couple of different rings around it to add a little bit of character. The switch cap has a bunch of tears to it as well, including a nice, I think you would call that like a gold accent ring around there and on the bottom as well. So it's certainly a very simple and sleek design, but it's not painfully bland like the stuff that you get today. Try to get a good thumbnail here. So I quite like this fan. I think it's very aesthetically pleasing. No, it does not have that traditional 80s nostalgia to it, which is what I usually go for, but it looks nice and it looks nice in the room as well. I wasn't sure how a black fan would look in here. I've never had one in here before, but it looks pretty good and it does match nicely. The stove is black. The lights here, this one and the one by the table, this is like a lead color. It's very dark, very similar to the oil rubbed bronze. The window handle hardware is black. These lights are black and brass, which is a very nice combination. So it does fit in here. It does fit the color scheme and it looks quite nice. It looks like it belongs here. We've talked about this a couple of times now. There's different types of ceiling fan installs that you can create. You can have like a collector's install. For instance, if I had three of these in here, that would just be ridiculous just because I like fans. That's like a collector's install. And then you could have an install where it looks like it would been something that an interior designer picked out when the room was constructed. This is one of those installs. It looks like it could have been here from day one. It's actually period correct to when this room was built and it just matches everything nicely. It's the appropriate size. This room is certainly big enough to handle it. It just looks like it was here forever since the room was built and it blends right in. So I'm going to go ahead and turn this on now. We'll start on low and we'll take a quick assessment of the performance on low. I'll see if I can get a wind reading. I doubt it. It's very gentle on low and then I have to put the heat exchanger fan back on the stove. Yeah, it's getting really hot. Let's put it on for a couple seconds here. So this runs very slow and I have to cut myself a slice of humble cake here because I claimed that the box says it runs at 140 rpm and that's just not the case. I don't know where on earth I got that from because I scoured the manual, the box, everything prior to this film and I can't find any word that says 140 rpm. I can't even find the rpm specification listed at all. So I don't know where I got that from. Totally wrong. 100% my error. No explanation of where that came from. I looked on the website prior to this taping, the Home Depot website, and it lists 66 rpm on high speed which I think is about right. This is extremely slow. I'm not even sure that we're going to be able to use the tachometer to get a good... I left that fan off for too long. I'm not even sure that this will read it because this is just going so slow. I don't know what the minimum rpm spec on this thing is. It is picking it up but then it drops off. I think it's just too slow. Let's say in 63. We have to cut that by five. Let's see. Let's see if that's a reasonable number. 63. Cut that by five. 12 rpm. Actually yeah, that seems about right. So 12 rpm on low. Let me write this down here. 12. Which is right up my alley. You know I like a nice low, slow low speed on ceiling fans. This in my opinion is a great fan and actually one of the reasons why I chose this fan more so for aesthetics was for the performance or rather more so than for aesthetics was for performance because I think objectively this is exactly what a ceiling fan should be. It should be something that turns very slow, is super quiet, but has very large steep pitch blades to move a lot of air quietly. As far as the performance goes, I can just barely feel a draft on low. Very very faint. Not much at all. We've got a couple different shots from around the room here. Well at this point I'll turn the stove back on because I'm not trying to assess the performance anymore. Now we'll go up to the medium. It's still a very gentle airflow on medium but you can tell there's a pretty high volume of air that's being moved. According to this box the CFM on medium is 4,664. It's allegedly 2,858 on low so it's not a big jump up between low and medium. That is one of the very few things I will say that I don't like about this fan is the separation in speeds is not great. The medium is not really in between low and medium but on medium I can feel a decent amount of air coming down and the way this moves the air is very interesting. It's not like a conventional fan. This pushes a very high volume of air slowly and we're going to talk at the end of the video about something called the ceiling fan wind speed factor which discusses the correlation of the CFM which is the volume, the size of the fan, and the speed of the wind and how those factors combine to overall impact the performance of the fan and the way it moves the air around the room. If I come over here by the desk which is a bunch of crumbs on the floor I can feel air moving. It's very very subtle but I can detect that there's air moving and I can see the plant is shaking as well. If I come over here onto the couch do I feel air kicking up off the floor? Yes. It's again it's a small amount of air but I can feel air kicking up off the floor in front of the couch which is very important. Very very gentle breeze but it is there. Take a look at this plant over here and there is even some movement on the top of the plant as well. Let's see if we can grab an RPM reading. Whoa that's great. Looks like about 208 is going to be the number so we'll cut that by five which gives us 41 RPM. Okay now I'm going to cut the stove back off and we'll bump up to high and this is where things start to get moving. The amount of air this pushes with this noise level is really quite remarkable. There's a slight motor hum which you can't hear over the stove but there's just about no wind noise. This is one of the quietest ceiling fans I've ever tested which is ironic because it's one of the most powerful and that's why I said this is exactly what a ceiling fan should be. This is exactly how fans should be designed. Large blades, steep pitch, low RPMs but very high and consequently very quiet air movement. So I'm curious now to get this RPM reading. I can't believe I thought it was set 140 somewhere and that spawned a whole bunch of unnecessary checking and testing and commentary. It's about 308 so three eight cut that by five sixty one so just a touch lower and you know give or take the accuracy of this thing whatever I think 61 versus 66 is very reasonable. Oh I forgot to rats I forgot to see if I could get a wind speed on medium and drop it back down here for a minute turn this garbage anemometer on and we got to change it from miles per hour which is a stupid unit to feet per minute which is also a stupid unit. Let's see if we can get a reading. Ah we can just barely 153 is what we're going to go with here 163 we'll do 153 and we'll calculate these at the end go back up to the high. So as the box indicates with the CFM ratings there is a significant jump between medium to high it's almost double and when you stay underneath this it's it's also very interesting to feel because it's not like a conventional fan where the air is rushing down in a column there is a tremendous amount of air pushing down from this fan but it's this like massive overwhelming gust that's very gentle it's very very smooth and very gentle it's kind of unlike any other fan I've ever experienced and that's the effects of these very very steep deep pitched blades according to the box it's 22 degrees pitch but I don't know how that's being measured because there's a scoop it's not a flat plane so I don't know how that's how you measure that but that's what it claims 22 degrees and it's it's running so slow but it's pushing out so much air and it's doing so just silently which is great I like quiet fans so quiet if I ever can acquire one I'd like to install a 60 inch Dayton industrial in here someday that I suspect would outperform this but other than that I don't think that there's going to be many more powerful ceiling fans in here at least in terms of volume of air move there are going to be fans in here that move a higher velocity in fact I think most fans probably move a higher velocity but this is definitely the highest airflow volume for sure you know again except for maybe some industrials so let's check around the room and see how the air is flowing there's quite a bit of air wafting across the floor and there goes our airflow test I have to pause this for a minute just for reference let's see how much air this pushes oh it's in a stupid unit we can't even relate to I'll put it to stupid miles per stupid minute or no per hour at least we can relate to that so that pushes out a 14 mile per hour wind gust it's pretty strong it creates pretty significant air currents here in the room and back uh four feet away from it or so it's still putting out almost three miles per hour of wind just over three so this really does push a significant amount of air around the room and consequently interfere with gentle air occurrence such as those from a ceiling fan and that's also why in the winter time I run the fan on medium or high not low because low will not combat that much current it just does nothing all right let's see what our wind speed is now this is pretty substantial oh that's in the wrong units stupid feet per minute 384 is what I can get pretty consistently I don't know it seems to be a bit less I think this meter is not very good these neighbors must think I'm so nuts because I'm always up here doing something with the with the fan we're gonna go with 346 yeah we'll go with 346 which is not that far behind some of the 52 inch fans that we've tested let's go across the room and take a look at our other plant here that wind is really kicking up outside it's such a bitter unpleasant day it looks nice out there but it's awful and standing here at the desk there's definitely air coming up but it's it's nowhere as near as much as I was expecting I actually don't think that it's much more than the Hampton Bay quick connect was and same thing over here and it's a little more over here there's there's a pretty substantial amount of air kicking up over here a little more than the quick connect but not a tremendous amount I wonder if the stupid anomaly would measure this I don't think so I don't think it's uh enough airflow I should really get a better one because I'd like to have a a record of how this is actually performing here oh we can get a reading just barely that's pretty significant 1.8 miles per hour over here and there goes our airflow test actually let's see does it go down now yeah it does see that now that all that heat's drafting up to the fan look how much has gone down look how much airflow we've lost I can feel way less too that's it it's gone now it's picking back up again now it's gone so case in point the stove makes a tremendous difference on the performance of the fan tremendous let's take a look at some numbers now I'm very curious to see how this is going to calculate out so in this case I've calculated our area to be 25.2 square feet and we took away 1.1 square feet from the surface area of the motor so we're going to use 24.1 as our number so 24.1 times 153 is uh 3,687 which is a fair bit less than what's on the box the box has 400 or 4,664 um let's see 346 times 60 nope that's just totally wrong 24 that's wrong too 24.1 times 346 see that's probably how I came up with that stupid number that 140 this stupid dyslexia inversion of everything 8,338.6 which curiously enough is almost exactly what the box says which is 8,341 and we're talking this number is off by a couple cfm so I feel like I've really nailed the cfm calculation at this point this is not the first time I've been able to come up with numbers that are very very very close to what's on the box so I'm glad I got a good handle on this I think it's very interesting so here's the specifications um 12 rpm on low that's that's pretty impressive I'm going to reverse this now which interestingly enough you have to do while it's running so oh no we're going to completely wreck the motor because you can't reverse things oh right um here we go listen carefully so what happened there was and hopefully this picked up the sound of the motor as well what happened was the um the fan blipped the power briefly so it was running it turned the power off turned it back on and then turned it back off and then you heard the relay click so that blip of the power it seems to be what that control box looks for and then reverses the fan and while we have it on reverse I don't really care much about reverse I never use it but just for the curiosity of it do I feel anything anywhere actually I do feel some air coming down the walls I'm surprised because the blades are not really reversible from an aerodynamics perspective it definitely doesn't move anywhere near as much air on reverse I can hardly feel this air coming down the wall but I can feel some which is more than I was expecting so let me go ahead and operate the reverse again actually another item of curiosity what's the rpm on reverse that's a massive motor in there it's a uh I think it was a 218 it's no 212 by 25 that thing's got a ton of torque I would expect it to go faster on reverse because it's under less load let's see okay 375 I got 378 before it's about the same 376 we'll cut it in the middle divided by 575 rpm so it does run a fair bit faster on reverse because there's less load so let's destroy the motor one more time by reversing it while it's on even though it really doesn't do any harm and we'll put it back to forwards and then we'll shut it off and during spin down I'm going to read an article here which is kind of interesting the off and you can see it starts to spin down very very quickly because of how much air those blades are pushing power consumption according to the box is 18 watts on low 38 watts on medium and 94 watts on high which is not bad I'm going to stand in front of the stove here to try to stop that um air current from going to the fan so this is a very economical way to cool a large space because you're using only less than 100 watts and this is it stirs up the air pretty thoroughly in the room so this article I'm about to read is located on the or was located on the Hanson wholesale ceiling fans section of the website people that have been involved in this hobby for a long time probably remember that website that website has been defunct for quite some time now fortunately this I'm going to move away from the stove now fortunately this section of the website is still available on the internet archive which I've printed out here this is from 2010 and it was revised on 2015 here's the article I'm going to put the fan back on because it's cold in here let's take a look at this article here this website was very good in terms of listing specifications for fans and laying it out in such a way that it's easy to compare one model to another we've discussed these cfm ratings kind of at length now on this channel both in terms of the usefulness and the accuracy or lack thereof of these cfm ratings the cfm rating by itself does not tell you how the fan is going to perform in a room because the velocity is also very important the fan gives you a cooling effect through wind chill and when wind chill is dictated by the velocity of the airflow so a higher airflow speed will give you a higher wind chill and greater cooling effect and that's kind of along the lines here of what this says so the wind speed factor is this is a calculation on the website and it actually still works which is kind of interesting and what it does is it takes the cfm number and it manipulates it based off of the blade the size of the fan to come up with the wind speed which we measured using this piece of junk anemometer here and so kind of what we're doing is the exact opposite we're using the blade span and the wind speed to determine the cfm which is interesting because i bet somebody could write a computer program that would do this which is outside of my realm of knowledge but that would be kind of cool so what it says is i'll read it out from the camera picks up the it's probably too small ceiling fan wind speed factor is a rough calculation of the potential wind speed any given ceiling fan produces in the column of air directly beneath it the calculation is based on the width of the fan and the cfm which the epa currently requires ceiling fan manufacturers to publish and i don't know if this is current or not but you can find some articles out there that discuss how the cfm is measured according to energy star specifications i don't know if the energy star specification is comparable to any regulations that the epa sets in terms of measuring the cfm so it goes on to say the wind speed factor allows you to compare the actual cooling capability between ceiling fans that are that are of different sizes and cfms the hypothesis ceiling fans push air down in a column of air that is roughly the same width or diameter as the ceiling fan if you have two fans that move the same cubic feet per minute of air and one is smaller than the other the smaller fan will have more concentrated airflow which will make you feel cooler if you stand or sit directly beneath it the larger moves air over a larger area so you will not feel as cool when you are directly beneath it because the main column of airflow is less intense now that's accurate in and of itself what i don't necessarily agree with is how this actually plays out in reality because here we have this fan the 68 inch fan moving 8 000 cfm which is which is funny and around the room it's kind of about the same as the 52 inch quick connect moving in the upwards of 6 000 cfm what's the difference the one of the best examples is the fans i had in the kitchen recently the smc kb 36s those push about 3600 cfm they're only 36 inches wide but the velocity of air coming out of those fans is outrageous and it allows them because the air is moving so fast to stir up the air in the room and make you feel less comfortable around the room pretty much as good as a 52 inch fan does despite moving less volume now when i think of a ceiling fan i think of whole room cooling or not cooling whole room circulation if you wanted a spot cool i would use a portable fan it's very rare that you set up a ceiling fan i mean with the exception maybe in a bedroom it's fairly common for one to be over a bed but it's fairly unusual to set up a ceiling fan and then sit or stand directly underneath it one of the nice things about ceiling fans is that they circulate a significant amount of air throughout the entire room so if you have a large group of people in a room now everybody's feeling the windshield cooling effect from the ceiling fan so this article is interesting because it it takes the wind speed into effect which is valuable what it doesn't do and i think maybe it just didn't go far enough it doesn't discuss how maybe there's no way to figure this out i don't know but it doesn't discuss how the wind speed impacts the air moving throughout the room which i think impacts it perhaps as much if not more than the volume of air moved and this this uh this antique not the antigua this altura is a great example of a very high volume amount of air but it's slow this moves a tremendous amount of air slowly so what happens your windchill effect is lower so i'm very curious and this might be the next install in here to put one of those smc kb36s up there and see how that pushes the air around just because it's so fast i suspect the results will be comparable to the 36 inch date and that was in here very high speed lower volume of air movement but very high speed lots of velocity high windchill factor so it's an interesting article i'll put a link to this in the video box that nobody reads if you want to go read this for yourself it's an interesting article and it it's on to something but it's not complete and again i don't know if this is just because the website shut down shortly after this and development of this concept ceased or you know whatever it was but very interesting take on this i had not seen anywhere else when i first put this in i said wow 8 000 cfm it's gonna be like having alaska 3733 on the ceiling now what i really said was wow this is gonna move so much air it's gonna be blasting air all over the room and it just it doesn't you can feel the air moving throughout the room but it moves the air so slow that i actually think it might be less effective at making people feel cool than other smaller more velocity based fans i've had in this room such as the quick connect so very very interesting to really analyze this up close and that's exactly why i got this my uncle has one of these i've used the fan at his house but i've never really meticulously analyzed it up close and that's exactly what i wanted to do here and i'm glad i did because this yielded some really interesting results that i was not expecting