I wouldn't necessarily say I make a hobby out of appliance repair, but it sure is something I find myself doing pretty regularly.
This tower fan has been running nearly continuously in my bedroom since about 2019, because my brain is normal. It's pretty dusty, and it's been knocked over a few times, but it's mostly kept on trucking. The other day, though, it started making an annoying clicking noise while running so I figured it was about time to give it some cleanup.
I'm doing this outside for a reason. The dust bunnies are already running free. If you don't like seeing stuff like that, this is your cue to leave the blog post, because it only gets worse from here.
Like many appliances seem to be these days, this fan is held together with a combination of Phillips screws, Torx screws, and plastic clips, so I need three different screwdrivers just to take the case apart. I'm really not sure why this is a thing, since the Torx and Phillips screws seem pretty much identical on the thread side.
You shouldn't pop clips on something with a big flat-blade screwdriver unless it's already beat to crap. Thankfully, I don't have to worry about that issue.
And this is just about as nasty as I expected. We've got dust everywhere, plus some hair wrapped around the motor shaft, which is probably the source of the noise. Obviously I'm going to clean that up, but I figured while I'm in here I might as well do some basic maintenance on the moving parts.
The top end of the rotor is retained by this bushing assembly, which is actually mostly made out of rubber for vibration damping. It's a neat part.
That comes out with two screws, and then it's just another screw on the bottom of the rotor that holds it onto the motor shaft. That one had some red silicone or wax or something holding it in place, which I won't completely be able to replace, but we'll deal with that later.
As an aside, if you're not aware of the physics involved in a tower fan's operation, go look it up. It's surprisingly complex! Think of what would need to happen for a symmetrical rotor to blow air through itself in one direction only.
Anyways, I took the air compressor to everything and cleaned up the bearing surface on the rotor shaft. Now it's time for some lubrication. My experience with this kind of low-load application is that quantity and placement of lubricant is more important than the exact type (quantity: way less than you'd think it needs, placement: directly on the contact surfaces), so I'm going with a drop of 30-weight motor oil on each of the motor bearings and a tiny dab of synthetic grease on the top bushing.
These two have been good for just about any lubrication problem I encounter around the house (let's acknowledge that a dirty joke could be made here and move along). Funnily enough, I originally bought the oil to work on my IBM Selectric, since it's one of the lubricants IBM specifies for it. Most auto parts stores will carry 30 weight without the additives commonly used in engine oil, which (maybe) can cause compatibility issues in non-automotive applications. (Frankly, I suspect I could put the 5W20 my car takes in the Selectric and it would be fine, but a quart of this stuff was about $7 and for the rate I use it around the house it should last the rest of my life.)
That's looking better and turning smoother. I just put a dab of threadlocker on the setscrew here before reinstalling it, which will hopefully be fine. It is a pretty vibration-heavy application (especially since a couple blades on the rotor are broken, so it's a bit unbalanced), but worst case it backs out in a year and I have to screw it back down. If I still even have the fan since then, because... yeah, the rotor is in pretty bad shape as these things go. I probably ought to replace it, but I don't want to do the research and figure out where to get a new tower fan that's any good right now.
I suspect this is one of those product categories where you simply cannot buy a high-quality tower fan. You can probably buy a more expensive tower fan, but internally it'll look just like this one. I hope to find out I'm wrong when I do decide to dig into it, but there's a reason there are all those jokes about niche Internet communities around specific classes of products: white-labeled home goods are absolutely everywhere, and it's a lot of work to track down suppliers and manufacturers and compare model differences on teardowns, so you often have better luck going on Reddit and finding someone with a collection of eight hundred tower fans in their attic and asking them. Why does that person have eight hundred tower fans in their attic? Don't worry about it.
Anyways, it still works. Isn't that nice.
"This is why no one likes to do maintenance to their vehicles, because, y'know I changed the filter, yeah, and it's better, but at the same time... it's not better, because it drives the same as it did before." – Haters Garage
I guess we'll see if I get another 7 years out of it.
