It gets hot in Florida, and my old garage fan wasn’t cutting it.
This past week, it hit 100 degrees in central Florida with 80% humidity. That’s hot enough to make you start sweating walking from your car to your house.
I knew I needed a better fan.
I upgraded from a Lasko Stanley 655650 fan to the
In this article, I’ll show how much better the
Why I Upgraded to the Air King Wall Mount Fan
I picked up my 20″ Lasko Stanley fan two summers ago for around $100. It does a decent job most of the time, but there are some things that I don’t like.
Its biggest drawback is that it has no oscillating feature. The placement of the outlets in my garage means I’m limited to where I can effectively mount a fan.
There’s a nice breeze on one side of the garage, but anywhere other than directly in front of the fan is stiflingly hot.
It has a remote control, which sounds cool (pun intended), but it’s actually a problem. Because it always defaults to ‘off,’ I can’t connect it to a smart outlet and integrate it with my Google Home or Amazon Alexa.
It’s also deafening, even at the lowest speed. You’re not usually going to have a quiet conversation in the garage. Still, I’d at least like to hear the music from my portable speaker over the fan. This was especially frustrating when I was converting my garage into a home gym, where I needed both ventilation and the ability to hear workout videos.
I’d been looking for a new fan for a few weeks and did a lot of research, but it took our latest heatwave to get me to pull the trigger.
I have to give a shout-out to Matt at Obsessed Garage for turning me on to
But
This model is the 99539 24″ quiet oscillating wall mount fan, which you can find on Amazon or Walmart.
I’ll warn you: it’s not cheap.
I could get another two Lasko Stanley fans for that price and still have money left over.
So why the
4.4
Air King’s industrial-grade wall mount fans offer powerful air movement, durability, and versatile options for various industrial spaces. With their low maintenance requirements and safety features, they are designed to provide reliable and efficient airflow.
- Three Speed (HiMedLow):
- 20-Inch powder coated metal blade
- 1/6 HP, 120V, 1 phase, totally enclosed ball bearing motor
- Air King’s industrial-grade wall-mount fans deliver high-volume airflow, ensuring effective air circulation in industrial spaces with limited floor space.
- Made with powder-coated steel blades, guards, and mounts. The motors are permanently lubricated and require little to no maintenance.
- Available in multiple sizes and with or without oscillation.
- Limited control options with the rear-mounted pull cord switch
The Two Most Important Things to Know When Buying a Fan
I want my fans to be effective, efficient, and quiet.
You can usually only pick two of those. If you want all three, it’s going to cost you. My Haiku interior fans get all three right, making them ridiculously expensive.
Marketing-type people will throw a lot of numbers at you to promote a product, but there are only two main things you need to look for when shopping for a fan.
The first is CFM or Cubic Feet per Minute. If the manufacturer is really on their game and includes a CFM per Watt metric, use that instead,
Cubic feet per minute is the amount of air the fan can move at any given speed. Usually, you’ll see three numbers listed: one each for low, medium, and high fan speeds.
CFM/Watt takes that CFM number and factors in how many watts of power the fan uses to get that much airflow. That lets you know how energy-efficient a fan is.
In both cases, higher numbers are better.
The second big thing to look for is the fan’s Decibel (dB) rating at each speed. The higher the dB, the louder the fan is, so go for lower numbers here.
Remember that your garage is a reasonably small space with lots of surfaces for sound to bounce off of. You want something that will be both effective and quiet.
Why the Air King Garage Fan?
It’s surprisingly hard to find a heavy-duty, wall-mounted fan.
The fans at your local Lowe’s or Home Depot look “industrial” but lack the performance and durability you need for your garage.
By contrast, many industrial fans you find online are designed for a warehouse or shop environment. They’re all extremely loud and clunky-looking, and that’s the exact opposite of what I’m looking for.
After seeing a lot of glowing reviews, I chose to go with
They have a dozen different industrial-grade wall-mount fans ranging in size from 18″ up to 30″ and power ratings between 1/6th and 1/3rd horsepower.
Eventually, I settled on the
It’s a “quiet fan.”
I’ll explain those quotation marks a little later in the article.
There was a standard (i.e., non-quiet) version of the fan, but the price difference was about $15 for an increase of 10 dB on the low setting.
That’s an easy tradeoff since I already knew this
Plus, I wanted something considerably quieter than my Lasko fan.
It moves a ton of air.
Here’s the big win.
I contacted Lasko directly to get a baseline of what I was upgrading from because they don’t put any CFM specs on their website.
| Low | Medium | High | |
| Lasko Stanley 655650 20″ fan | 2520 CFM | 2746 CFM | 2932 CFM |
| Air King 99539 24″ fan | 2280 CFM | 4320 CFM | 5030 CFM |
What jumped out at me was that this
It’s lower output on the low setting than the
But it’s pricey
As I mentioned earlier, the Lasko fan is about $100 for a 20″ fan, and the
