I like fans. I also like air conditioning and I don’t hesitate to use it.
“Fans use around 1% of the electricity consumed by air conditioners. You could leave a fan running for a full 24 hours and still use less energy than 15 minutes of air conditioning.”
I bring this up because I can’t convince my Taiwan friend who has no budget problem but will still not turn on air conditioner or fan even though it’s unbearably hot.
Problem is in Taiwan fans are mostly useless because buildings here suck at ventilation. I see some places like mechanics shop use swamp coolers but again they don’t work in Taiwan because of humidity. So there are few alternatives to AC.
I would leave his/her house if no air-con or fans, say something like let’s go to Lousia, I need air-con.
personally i dont like sleeping with AC, i turn ot off before going to bed and sleep with a fan.
last apartment we had a ceiling fan and managed without AC most of the summer.
The two things really aren’t comparable because they do different things. A fan just moves air around and causes evaporative cooling at your skin surface. An aircon is a heat pump that directly lowers the room temperature.
I never use aircon during the day because a fan works fine … but the only reason it works fine is that I work from home and, um, don’t wear much. It would be virtually useless if I were fully clothed. If it’s not too hot then a fan does the job at nighttime too, but above a certain air temperature - my limit is about 27’C - then the aircon gets switched on. As TL said, humidity is a big factor here; if the air is very humid then evaporative cooling becomes very inefficient.
This isn’t true. It’s about 10% (a fan runs at about 70W, an aircon at something less than 1kW, on average). And the aircon consuming 700W of power is usually producing 3kW of cooling capacity.
I don’t pick sides.
Fan, dehumidifier and AC at night.
Fan and dehumidifier during the day.
Admittedly, we have a king sized bed and a queen sized loft so we can sleep five in a bedroom during the summer to save electricity.
Perhaps this is comparing to central air conditioner that draws over 3000 watts. If you limit cooling space it can be almost as efficient as a fan. If you manage ac sizing you can get the best benefit vs electricity use.
Fans just circulate the same warm, stale air and make it go faster. They’re next to useless in a Taiwanese summer. Air cons are preferable but I do have the pesky problem of “air con throat” when I wake up. It dries me out too much. On the other hand, if I don’t put it on then I wake up soaked in sweat which is also unpleasant. I hate the summers here.
Maybe so, but it would not be a sensible comparison. A fan is effective over a few square meters at most. It wouldn’t be reasonable to compare that with whole-house cooking.
Open windows and fan at home, still comfortable when it’s 30 deg inside. For me using AC feels like a trap, since you don’t let your body adjust to the heat and then you die once outside. I use a little AC in the car, but always set the temperature quite high so the difference between inside and outside is not that big.
I love hot weather and being from a “polar” country, where good weather lasts for 2-3 months, moving to a hot climate country was always my dream.
It’s still too cold in Taipei during winter (said the person that had -20 deg winters back home 
but we also have thermal insulation and central heating…) and would prefer to move to Kaohsiung, but unfortunately professional jobs are mostly up here north 
A fan is ok but AC is better when the weather is very hot, I just turn it off a while before i go out so my body can start to adjust.
With E-fan would be enough for me + open window, but I got toddler at home who sweat a lot.
AC on will cost me at least NTD 4k +/- (2 month bills)
What’s a E-fan? Is it one of those swamp cooling thing? They don’t work in the humidity in Taiwan.
Electric Fan
What other fans are there? Wind-powered?
Duh, of course. I expected that reply. But are you going to be using them when you’re sleeping?
Fan servants of course!
Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners (Cléopâtre essayant des poisons sur des condamnés à mort) is an 1887 painting by the French artist Alexandre Cabanel.
I’m the opposite.
If I sleep with the fan on, I wake up with a sore throat.
AC suits me better, even if set to 28°C instead of the usual below 25°C
I also get a headache if I have a fan trained on me at all time. It not only fails to cool me sufficiently, it makes me sick. AC doesn’t do that.
