52" Casablanca NG05WW Next Generation Augusta Ce iling Fan in Snow White | Bedroom Installation

Hello viewers, today we're going to be taking a look at this Casablanca 52-inch flush mount next generation Augusta series ceiling fan. This is the NG05WW next generation Augusta ceiling fan. I purchased this originally as a nostalgia item. There was a hotel that we went to in Florida back in the early 2010s that had either this model or something very very similar to it in the rooms. And as I've had it up here and as I've installed it and as I look at the box now it's becoming kind of interesting to me because it's it's such a product when you really unpack it. I got some interesting comments on the installation video of this and one of the comments described this product as a result of Casablanca having an identity crisis. And I thought that was an interesting comment because that's kind of exactly what this feels like. Casablanca historically is a very high-end expensive brand and then it comes out with an attempt at an economy product and it is the definition of one of these is not like the other and it just really doesn't make any sense. The graphics on this box... I don't know how much this retailed for originally and I don't know where it was sold. I really can't picture this having been sold in a showroom. I can't picture this box with these goofy shapes and color graphics next to the box for a Panama or a Zephyr or a Victorian which had very fancy boxes. And even this box you have this fancy font here for the logo the Casablanca logo and then you have basic simple fonts and then what looks like a middle school graphic design project for the front picture of the box. This graphics reminds me of something else that color scheme with like basic shapes and colors. I can't recall what else it is though. If anybody recognizes this as something else let me know what other things look like that. It just looks really familiar but I can't grasp what it was at this time. So it's just it's a very strange product and the fan itself is actually not so bad. I was initially bothered by the installation process mostly by the mounting bracket because it's a very similar system to this one here where you have nuts that go on studs that pass through these holes. And this one is very easy to work with because there's space here to use a ratchet or a long handle driver but the Casablanca's design has the nuts going in right around here. So you're limited to using a crescent wrench at best and it just makes for a very frustrating installation process over an inch of material. It just doesn't make any sense and I think this is kind of where one of the places where Casablanca failed in building an economy product in the sense that it's not easy to install. And normally Casablanca doesn't really have to take that into consideration because if you're going to you know burn $600 on a ceiling fan you're probably not going to install it yourself and therefore you really don't care how easy or not it is to install. Whereas brands like Hampton Bay for instance were aimed at being easy to install so that the average home user who's not super mechanically inclined can buy the fan at a good price and install it with limited working knowledge of how to do it and be successful in the project. This doesn't achieve that at all. There is a lot of parts to get this put together, lots of screws, lots of assembly and if you're not mechanically inclined, you don't like doing stuff like this, this would frustrate the average user. So that was a disappointment initially. Now that I've used the fan a couple times I do have a better opinion of it now. So before we get into the fan let's take a look at this box in greater detail here. So there's a lot of words on the front of the box which is not not the best eye-catching design in my opinion. It says high performance maintenance-free motor with sealed bearings require no oiling. That's not necessarily grammatically incorrect but it's not a very well-worded sentence. You know if you're going a bunch of sentences on the front of a box the sentences should be very short, they should read very quick, very catchy, very easy. That doesn't do that. That's kind of a weird way to word it and I wouldn't really call it high performance either. It's a 153 by 16 motor which is not the smallest you can get but it's close to it. 25 year motor warranty backed by Casablanca's National Network of Authorized Service Centers. Sleek hugger profile gives a striking accent to any room where high clearance may be a concern. Again it's just like weird wishy-washy ways to word these things. Reversible hardwood blades precision matched for years of wobble-free operation. Three-speed reversible motor utilizes state-of-the-art technology. You mean copper wire around a magnet? For optimum efficiency and silent operation. All right. 52 inch low profile five blade snow white motor with white bleached oak blades. I can't get past this box because you have a bunch of... I think of a board meeting at Casablanca. You have a bunch of people dressed in suit and ties floating in money sitting in this fancy room with elegant chairs and a big expensive table and this comes up on the screen. Actually this is in the 90s. It probably would have been on a printout, a big piece of paper and they put this piece of paper up on an easel and say here's our design and and this is supposed to be taken seriously. I just I don't get it. It's more text text mania here on the side. The high performance motor is micro balanced using the finest precision tolerance available in the industry. This specially designed maintenance-free motor has sealed bearings which require no oiling. The average user could care less. All I'm not going to go through and read all this but all these things are to throw throws around buzzwords and you know fancy terms that the average user looking for an economy grade product could care less about. If you're buying an economy product you just want something that works. You don't care about state-of-the-art high efficiency precision balance machining all that garbage. That's fine on the $700 fan that you're trying to work up to sell but not for an economy product. This is another area where Casablanca failed to market an economy product to an economy product buyer. The back of the box is more text galore and it concludes by saying Casablanca the next generation quality at a price you can afford. I have no idea what the retail price on this was but I have a feeling that this was not all that affordable and quite frankly I think if this costs more than 40 or 50 dollars this was not a good deal because you could go to the Home Depot and buy the Carriage House which was very similar in aesthetics to this and the Carriage House blows this out of the water in terms of performance. It's easier to install and it probably cost a fair bit less than this did. Among the text galore is something that actually has zero relevance to this product whatsoever which I think is kind of funny. It says the one two three advantage. Another advantage of Casablanca's next generation fan is just how easily it can be installed. Each fan weighs between 13 to 18 pounds because the motor is too small and can be handled comfortably by one person. Our dual mount hanging system which is not relevant to this product comes standard with all of our products which is not accurate because it's not relevant to this product and will let you adapt to a variety of installation needs which is not accurate or relevant to this product. Using a UL listed junction box, a screwdriver, and the contents of this package installation is as easy as one two three. The only problem is this whole third of the box is only relevant to downrod mount fans which this is not making the right choice. I think the better choice would be to go down to the Home Depot and pick up a Hampton Bay branded Carriage House. It says another value built into next generation ceiling fans is our electronically reversible motors. Now I think the correct terminology would be electrically because electronic is would be dumb touch. It should say electrically reversible but that's just being particular about it. It also claims that this is going to handle a 20 by 20 room. I don't think so. I really don't see that. The only date related information I can find on this unit is this copyright date which is 1994. According to a user in the comments box these were on the market for over a decade so it is possible that these were made for long enough to have eventually come with concealed hardware. On the other side of the box it says made in Taiwan to Casablanca specifications. I'll try to remember when editing this to put in the pictures of the fan at the hotel. Actually I'll do it here. So I haven't yet looked at the pictures. Maybe something in that picture tells us it's not a Casablanca. I don't know but I do know that there were several other models available. I think the Emerson Snugger was one of them that looked pretty much exactly like this. Doesn't really matter. The nostalgia serves its purpose whether or not it was the exact model or not. It's generally a pretty nice looking fan. I don't really have any gripes with it from an aesthetics perspective. My only comment would be because the motor housing is ventless I do think that this would have looked better with concealed hardware on the irons to be more consistent with the design scheme of the housing. But that is a fairly minor gripe and quite frankly in 94 or around thereabouts concealed hardware was not really a thing yet. That did not seem to become popular until the 2000s. I mentioned this in the assembly video and I'll underscore it again for those that didn't see that video. Several of the screws you can see one right there in the center of the screen. Several of the screws were discolored and I don't want to say rusted but kind of starting to break down and decay in the package. And you can see some of that on the chain here. The severe tarnishing of the chain. I don't know what's up with that. That's a little disappointing. The screws are not decaying in the sense like the Altura screws were. I don't think they've lost any integrity. It's just an aesthetics issue. The other side of the blades is a very light colored bleached oak. It's almost kind of, let's look at this, it's kind of grayish which I was surprised for 94. I would have expected something like this today. It's not horrible but I've definitely seen other bleached oak that I like better. That's why I opted to install it with the white. Plus the white configuration was what was in the hotel room. Also on a note of storage decay, I think that these imperfections there that you can see on the blades, I believe that's part of the paper packaging stuck to the blades. They're just stinking glared. It's making it difficult to see. I'm not exactly sure what that is. It's obvious only at certain angles. It's obvious at this angle where the light's hitting the blades a certain way. Not so much on the ground. The blade pitch is average at best. Motor size is average. It's just very average and if it was at the right price point that's fine but when you put a name like this on an average product it just, it just, it doesn't work. Certain brands are good at making economy products. The developers of those brands know what the economy market looks like, what an economy consumer is drawn to, what features are important, what things don't matter, and likewise certain brands are good at designing expensive products and those brands know what people with a lot of money look for. They know what features are important for a wealthy household and a lot of times when those brands try to market towards and build products for the opposite it just doesn't go that well and I think that this is, that's this. And not to say this is a horrible product but and again I don't know what the retail price was. If I knew what the retail price was I could make a much better call on this but I really think that you would have got a much better value out of a Hampton Bay product especially considering that there were Hampton Bay models that looked very similar to this. All right let's shut this on. I think it's going to be on low. Let's move it to pretty significant motor hum. It's audible throughout the room on high even above the wind noise. It's not bad but it's there and it's it's quite prominent depending on where you are in the room how it's resonating around the room and if this costs 20 bucks oh well but if this is 150 bucks I don't think that's acceptable. This is actually quite noisy and this is during the day try to run this at night while you're sleeping well you're going to hear that motor hum for sure and you have Casablanca building its reputation on quiet fans and someone buys this and puts this up and hears that motor not good. As far as the performance is concerned it's actually not bad for a flush mount you know let's see if we can make some CFM calculations here we're going to go with 355. Interestingly enough the airflow is not here it doesn't really start until right around here and then it tapers off quickly it's like there's just a small area of airflow so 355 355 times 14 is 4970 CFM so that's actually like a solid average performance and then you know we'll give it a little more credit because it's a flush mount so performance wise that's actually not that bad. Now considering what it's doing with a 153 by 16 motor which is on the smaller end and considering how close the blades are to the ceiling well we'll give it a pass on performance it's actually pretty decent and it's a shame that the motor noise is so prominent because the air noise is quite minimal runs pretty smooth see how the switch housing even has kind of a gapless appearance to it like the motor housing does that's why the iron's not being concealed hardware really bothers me you can feel a off the floor and we can see some plants moving around pretty good so I think performance wise it delivers I do think so that the carriage house is more powerful I think the carriage house is actually ironically among one of the most powerful flush mount fans I've tested the older one from the 90s early 2000s there I'm not sure about the one that's made today I recently found out that the carriage house is still available in polished brass to this day the the newer version which is kind of intriguing I do like that fan and it is nostalgic I might have to pick one of those up okay so on high that was 4,970 cfm which is decent for a flush mount let's see if we can get an rpm reading it gave me one reading of 11,000 is that 1100 is that reasonable 220 I don't think so I don't think that's 220 that seems kind of fast as far as it's not picking up on the irons they're fairly shiny 876 867 okay let's do 870 divided by 5 174 rpm that I think is reasonable 174 rpm so that like the airflow is a pretty respectable high speed speed and if you notice it's hanging crooked that's not a fault of the fan that's a fault of the installation I didn't feel like sitting there with a crescent wrench and tightening every single bolt until it got even so that's why it's crooked that could be corrected very easily all right let's drop down to the medium and interestingly enough the motor noise goes away on medium and low now I do have a significant critique about the range and speeds and this is something I would say about a lot of the 90s hunters as well the variance in speeds is not good the medium and low are much slower than high and they're fairly close to each other this medium is nowhere near in between low and high it's nowhere near halfway this is like almost a fast low but it's quiet it's very very quiet there's a slight cyclic buzz but very very quiet I would say at this point the motor noise is actually negligible that is a very very quiet fan now it is let's see if we can get a wind speed reading oh we can 240 that's 3360 cfm okay let's drop down to the low and it remains silent on low just the high speed that's got a significant motor hum to it so as you can see there's not a lot of difference between medium and low which is disappointing because high speed is so strong you've got you know really strong wind or gentle and very gentle there's like nothing moderate and this is not really a very slow low speed there's still a decent amount of air coming around I don't think enough to get a reading but let's see it's just barely trying to move the meter right in the threshold of if it's going to spin or not well that gave us 28 let's see that's 28 times 14 390 cfm that's not accurate no way that meter is not very precise once it gets down to the lower um lower wind speeds it just doesn't work good but you can see here there is still decent air moving not much but it's there and if you're talking about an install over a bed that little draft is enough to keep you comfortable on a hot night I think I remember the motor vents being a little different on the uh one in the hotel room I don't know how to look at the picture now confirm I'm not completely certain a long time ago that memory has faded I do like the appearance of the fan overall it's a nice light airy feel perfect for springtime as I mentioned in the install video I like to use lighter colored and or flush mount fans in the spring to go with the feel of spring the very refreshing feel of springtime I'm going to shut it off so overall it's not a bad fan it's pretty good performance a little noisy though and the marketing is definitely questionable definitely questionable and probably wasn't very good very successful but performance is decent appearance is nice it's just not very well tailored to an economy market from the the weird verbiage in the box the assembly process not being particularly easy and I really find it hard to believe that this was sold at a good price I don't know maybe it was but I think if this cost more than 40 bucks 40 or 50 dollars in 94 there were better options the Hampton Bay carriage house the the older version the motor housing is almost identical to this very very similar I think a lot of average users would not tell the difference between those two fans if they were just looking at it quickly and I'm sure it was probably cheaper and I think it definitely offers better performance not that this is bad this is a good performing unit too but I'll tell you that those earlier Hampton Bay fans brand Hampton Bay branded many of those were very very high performance and they get a lot of unnecessary hatred among collectors and I really don't understand why because they were objectively very good products so that's it for this one the Casablanca Next Generation which I guess now is the previous generation poorly marketed economy grade sealant fan