Vornado Fit Personal Circulator

Price: About $30.

Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours
Click on the image to order.

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Reviewer: Mark Lamendola

This is a nifty little fan, and on the low setting it is very, very quiet. The base makes its aim easily adjustable, so I thought I would try setting it on my night stand for a night and seeing if I could sleep with it running. I could, I did, and I was very comfortable even though it was too warm in the room. So now I'm thinking I'll do this every night versus a floor fan. On hot nights last year, I used the floor fan combined with a fairly high setting on the AC. With this fan providing just the right amount of air and so quietly, I can probably raise the thermostat a couple of more degrees.

I had a small personal fan for years, and last fall it finally just stopped working. As spring moved along, I began thinking about replacing that and came across this Vornado fan. I like the way it looks, rather stylish. Unlike the personal fan it replaced (and the one before that), it has two speeds. That's a nice touch. I prefer a lower speed most of the time, but sometimes I want more output from a fan. With only a single speed, you have to choose a slow fan or a fast one or maybe buy one of each.

Unlike some fans I've had, this one is easy to clean. I don't want a dirty fan blowing dirty air on me, nor do I want to hear it rattle rattle itself to death from an unbalanced, dirty blade. For this unit, you just have to remove a single screw from the back and then rotate the grill. I've had other fans that make grill removal impossible. The only way to clean those is to spray water kind of sideways into the thing while it's upside down. This does a poor job of cleaning, plus you have to let the thing sit over a register vent or other source of moving air for a day or so to make sure it's dry. Not so with the Vornado. You can actually get in there and wipe everything clean.

Fans like this have all kinds of uses; they aren't limited to blowing on the user. Here are some uses I make of small fans like this one:

• Dry spinach off after I wash it, so it doesn't rot. Then I cut the end off the bundle and put the upside down bundle in a deep container. It all stays fresh.
• Cool down my oven after baking. One fan blows into the oven, and another exhausts out the kitchen window (propped ever so carefully there).
• Accelerate clothes drying. I use an indoor clothes rack, and placing a little fan in front of it cuts drying time hugely.
• Dry kitchen sponges and kitchen towels. I make kitchen towels from old clothes cut to about 5x7. Along with sponges, they get wet and need to dry. The fan makes short work of that.

This Vornado is an excellent choice for a small fan.