Best place to buy ceiling fans?

[clay]

I purchased and installed a high-quality MinkaAire fan from here: http://www.lightingdirect.com/
last summer, and have been very pleased with it. It was higher quality and lower priced than anything I could find locally at Lowes or HD.

this one (in white): http://www.lightingdirect.com/minkaaire-...ed/p293073

moves air quite well in a small-ish room.

[lazydays]

I have a Casablanca fan. It was insanely expensive, beautiful and overbuilt. Nevertheless it did require servicing this year and the price to repair was not worth it. So they sent me the full purchase price of the fan. Incredible company.

I also have several Hunters that have so far worked well for me although they tend to lack the style I prefer. They are actually the parent company to Casablanca.

I have two Fanimation fans which have been excellent but again fairly expensive.

I purchased all from Amazon using Amazon Prime to avoid shipping costs.

[decocritter]

I like a basic fan with no light kit, the same color as my ceiling - white - so it disappears. I find light kits don't really give enough light to make up for all the confusion going on in the middle of the ceiling. Competes with decor.


That said, different fans can work in different decors - high ceilings, etc.


The minka looks nice for a modern home.

[Robert M]

Deco,

True. I have white ceilings. So, I bought white fans, with white blades and a white light kit for the same reason. The light kit in the kitchen is a candelabra that takes 5 qty 60 watt bulbs. It produces _lots_ of light. So much so that I'm swapping them out for 40 watt bulbs.

The kits in the other rooms are white alabaster and use 3 qty candelabra bulbs. I forget the wattage. These don't provide enough light by themselves for the room for reading but they are fine for general lighting purposes, i.e. light for watching TV. Not good for reading or on my desk. Lamps take care of that.

Robert

[Uncle Wig]

If you like Modern design, YLighting is good. I bought a Cirrus Hugger a few years ago for my bedroom and it is fantastic. It is dead silent, save for a little "whoosh" sound on high. It doesn't require a remote (wall switch with dimmer) and uses a standard bulb. It's a little expensive but has been worth every penny. It's been in production unchanged since 1999 so I don't think it'll be going out of style. Since it's above my bed, I really couldn't tolerate anything I wouldn't want to have directly in my line of sight.



By coincidence, just yesterday I installed a Monte Carlo Traverse BSD from Lighting Direct. No complaints with my transaction with them. The fan itself seems well made, and it is very quiet. It uses pull chains which is fine with me, but I have it connected to a wall switch with an on-off for the fan and a dimmer. It uses a halogen bulb. But I have to say particular fan looks nicer in the photos than in person. It now seems grotesquely large and bulbous. But it's in my office which is a small room, and it would probably look better in a bigger room.

Robert M, I'd be interested in knowing what your electrician doesn't like about the Monte Carlo fans.

[Rolando]

How about this one?

[thermarest]

Our local small lighting store charges 2x what the big boxes do for basically identical fans, or 5-10x for more stylish/esoteric/fancy products. If Lowe's or HD has a fan you like aesthetically, just do that.

[DharmaDog]

I had Monte Carlo fans in last house. They worked well.

I had a great room with ~20' foot ceilings that had 2 Monte Carlo fans on what were ~8' down rods.

Only one of them ever shook, and then only when very dusty.

I was impressed.

May go look at that brand a local dealer.

Anyone using fans with DC motors?

[Grateful11]

This is probably the nicest ceiling fan we've had. It's a 60" Hunter we got at Home Depot for like $275.
and put in our garage conversion. It is extremely quiet and smooth. The electrician wired it so that
there's a separate switches on the wall for the fan and light, I wish I knew how to wire like that. It's not
the big heavy cast iron Hunter's that you can still get but it's still nice.

[D. Lawson]

Grateful11 wrote:
The electrician wired it so that there's a separate switches on the wall for the fan and light, I wish I knew how to wire like that.

The fan motor has one set of wires, the light kit has another (usually connected to some sort of plug that connects to the motor). You just need to run two wires to the fan, each one coming off a switch. Our rental house needed to be rewired, and we had all of the fans with lights run that way, easy enough to do when the house is gutted. I retroactively wired one of the upstairs fans in our own house that way, but I'm not inclined to spend that amount of time in the crawlspace again to do the second one.