Customer Reviews

Soleus Air FT1-20-10, 8-Inch Soft Blade Table Fan

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

THE QUICK TAKE: The Soleus Air Soft-Blade Table Fan is a compact, quiet personal fan with an interesting design. If small size and low noise are important considerations for your use of a fan - such as for a table, desktop, bedside or countertop - consider this fan.

There are three major reasons why you might want to consider this fan:

First, it's compact - about 10" high, and 9-1/2" wide, and about 5.5" deep. (The four feet could stand on something 5-1/4" wide x 4" deep.) Since it's designed not to need an enclosure to keep things away from the blade, it can be smaller.

Second, while it's not silent, it's fairly quiet, and the noise is soothing rather than irritating. You could easily have a phone conversation without needing to turn the fan off, as long as the fan was a few feet away. Some may even like the way it masks other noises, in an office or as a bedside fan. Certainly no one (such as a co-worker) more than 5 feet away should be bothered by the noise.

Third, this Soft Blade fan has a fun and interesting design. The blades are softish, and the motor is designed to slow or stop if something comes in contact with the blades. Though it is unpleasant to touch - the blades spin fairly fast! - and children or animals might be a little distressed by it.

One bonus, this fan is of course a lot easier to clean than a regular fan with an enclosure - and as you know fans get dirty!

It's fairly stable, the layout of the four feet helps on that account. Mine has a slight wobble when it runs, due to something being slightly imbalanced in the fan. If it's more than slight you might want to exchange it.

This moves a reasonable amount of air, a light breeze perhaps. You do have to be realistic about what an 8" fan can do, in terms of moving air. If you need more air, get something bigger and noisier.

The negatives are minor:

- The color scheme takes away from the design, with a light gray frame and a darker gray fan blade. I'd have preferred all one color.

- You have to reach around the back to turn it on or off, which is only slightly awkward and probably the only place to put the switch other than on the cord.

- There's just one fan speed. It would be nice to have a quieter, slower option. (There are two On positions, but both do the same thing - there's just one fan speed.)

According to the label it uses 25 watts of power, which is a relatively small amount.

I had to give this product a three star rating, as one of the two fans I ordered did a slow death... Initially it did not spin very fast and after a few days of periodic use, it refused to spin when turned on (unless I twirled the blade to get it going).

Amazon has been great as usual so far on handling the return and the replacement fan seems to work fine.

Had it not been for the slow motion death, I would give the product a five rating.

That said, these fans are incredibly quiet (much quieter than my Dyson Air Multiplier costing 10X as much) - indeed, they are almost silent - and therefore perfect for office use. They are very much personal fans however - you won't get much breeze more than four feet away and that will be a gentle to moderate airflow. Another feature that works well for office are the rubber feet that the fan sits on ...there's no "walking" in direction of power cord like past finger-safe fans I've had - this fan stays put. There is also zero vibration transmitted to the desktop.

Two other details to mention ...common to all the fans that I received:

1) the power switch, when rotating between on / off position causes a noticeable "pop" sound on my computer speakers ...electrical noise. Not too big a deal, but makes you wonder about the quality of the switch.

2) also to be clear, even though there are two ON settings (you can turn the on / off knob either left or right from the off position), there is only one speed as far as I can tell.

I bought one of these almost a year ago, and yes it lasted about two months before the dry bearing sound. I just let it sit on the dresser. I tried to pull off the blade to check the bearing, no luck. Yesterday having some time I decided to pull or break, while looking at the blade I noticed two screws in the front face in back of the blade, I undid them and the motor came out easily. A couple of drops of 3in1 and it is back working great. I am glad it was the rear bearing dry, the front one would be hard to get to. Anyway it is a nice little fan, I am glad I only paid $15 at BJ's. Looks like a quality or engineering problem.

I was looking for a quiet, powerful fan. Well this is the quietest fan I have ever come across. It's crazy quiet! I doubt there's a quieter fan made.

It's not so powerful though. But good enough. I'm not complaining. I think the reason it's so quiet is there's no grill. But to keep it from being dangerous they have to keep the rpm's low. You can stick your finger right in it. If you do, it hurts a little, but it won't cut you like a regular fan.

I've had it about 6 weeks. So far, no problems. Seems well-made and durable. I like the way it looks too.

UPDATE -

this fan was great right up until about a month ago, when the motor burned out - boo

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Old review below

They keep my office at around 75 degrees year round, and this is far too warm. I wanted a small fan that would be quiet and nice looking.

The fan has 3 positions, On, Off, On which struck me as a little odd, but its fine. The default speed is perfect, though it would have been nice to have more than one speed. The blades are soft and rubbery to the touch, I put my fingers in it for fun regularly while its running. It will throw things though, so putting pencils and pens into it is not recommended if you want to keep your eyes. The fan has perfectly met my particular needs.

Upsides:

Its beautiful

Nearly Silent

Pushes a fair amount of air.

Downsides:

One Speed

Not angle adjustable

I bought this fan back in May 2010 and one day in November 2010 I went to turn it on and the motor did not have enough power to get the blades moving. I cleaned what little dust was on it and tried moving the blades by hand to loosen up any built up grime and now the blades turn so slowly you can barely feel any breeze just inches from it. It was always underpowered to begin with but now it is useless.

I contacted the company under the one year limited warranty that this fan comes with and the company wanted me to do the following in order for them to honor the warranty:

1.) Cut off the power cord and mail it to them (I assume to ensure the fan is dead). Estimated cost: $[...]

2.) Send a money order ($2 service charge at a grocery store) in the amount of $12 to cover the cost of shipping the new fan out to me

Total cost to me: $[...]-$[...] on a $[...] fan. I would have rather paid the full $[...] to get a brand new fan from Amazon (assuming the fan was a good product to begin with) and saved the hassle of getting a money order and going to the post office to get everything ready for them.

In short, the fan blows but not in a good way.

We were looking for a small, quite fan and this is definitely it!!!! We tried several fans advertised as quiet, but they were everything but!! We were so pleased to plug in the Soleus fan & hear--almost nothing--finally a QUIET FAN!! We would highly recommend it!

I purchased three of these fans, and all three have ceased to function. Within two months these fans will begin to make a grinding noise then stop working altogether. Which is very unfortunate because visually Soleus Air has created a beautiful modern fan.

I was looking for a desk fan, one that would create a moderate air flow in my office. I am really sensitive to fan noise, though, so I wanted one that was silent. I took a chance with this fan and was very impressed with it when it arrived. It had acceptable air flow (on the weak side, but within the range of what I was looking for) and it was, indeed, silent. The problem was that after about 2-3 weeks of use, the fan starting to make a lot of noise. It probably was a bearing problem or something similar, but over the next few weeks it got increasingly worse and I just stopped using the fan. When I informed the manufacturer of the problem they took about a month to respond to me and then told me I had to pay them $12 and send back a piece of the fan before they'd replace it (they don't offer a repair option). Sorry, but paying 50% of the purchase price to get a replacement for a product that should have not had the problem in the first place is not what I consider fair.

I've read other reviews where people figured out how to resurrect this fan, but given the fact that it only worked for an hour before it broke, I really wouldn't recommend this to anyone. I found another quite fan on amazon that works perfectly fine.