I’ve heard my whole life that “you burn more energy waving a fan than by just not moving” and I was wondering if there was any truth to this. I’m currently using a foldable paper fan and it seems to be pretty effective. I don’t have an air conditioner so this is a dire situation
In: Biology
Well clearly you burn more energy waving anything around then by not doing so. But the point of a hand fan isn’t to decrease energy use but to increase relative comfort. A nice slight breeze is usually enough to make us *feel* slightly cooler even though we’re using energy to do it. Exercise bikes back in the day operated on this principle, by having the thing you move also be a fan that sends air at you. So, by pedaling you also create a breeze to help you keep cooler.
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I believe they function on evaporative cooling, basically using your sweat to keep you cool.
You burn more energy doing something compared to not doing it, sure, but that only tells half the story.
The word “burn” here is slightly misleading since not all of the expended energy is turned into heat. Some of it is turned into moving the fan, and by extension, the air around it.
The real question should be: “is the added cooling capacity of the fan enough to offset the increased heat generated by moving it?”. The answer here is probably “yes” since you feel cooler with the fan compared to without. This is mostly due to increased evaporation of sweat with increased air flow.
A more extreme analogy would be cooling systems in a car. The added fans, pumps and electric circuitry actually generate some extra heat, but the increased cooling capacity is more than enough to offset that, leading to a cooler system in total.
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