Is it weird to get excited about a ceiling fan? I’m a bit of a technophile, but blaming my excitement on that alone doesn’t do this fan justice.
The short version of why I love it?
- It looks great.
- You can get it in sizes up to 84″ wide
- It’s REALLY POWERFUL (double most other ceiling fans)
- It’s quiet
- It only uses 54 watts at it’s highest setting
- It talks to my thermostat and comes on automatically
- It connects to other smart assistants like Alexa
- It has a standalone app for controlling it
- It has a 1280 liumen light that only uses 16 watts and can dim all the way down to 3%
- Even at 84″ wide, it only weights 26 lbs.
We’ve had our Haiku fan installed for a little over 2 weeks, so I’ve been able to run it through all the paces and see how it works in the real world. I’d say I’m even a little more experienced with it than the normal user, because I installed it myself on our 18.5 ft tall ceilings (I’m afraid of heights, so if you want to enjoy a laugh at the expense of my fear, you can watch our installation video here).
The installation was straightforward, and they do an awesome job at laying everything out in separate labeled boxes and easy to follow steps. They even have color coded stickers on the blades to make sure you install them in the right location, which likely has to do with some balancing they do with the fans before shipping them out because even at the highest speed, its hard to see any wobble at all, and at it’s highest speed, it’s pushing A LOT of air. It’s sort of like a mini- hurricane in our living room… it’s that powerful.
Haiku doesn’t recommend reversing the direction of the fan in colder months like you would with some other fans, and I have to believe it’s because the fan would be putting some strain on the ceiling. Normally it’s blowing air downwards, reducing the amount of weight the ceiling is holding, but when it’s reversed, and blowing air up… you can see how that would be a problem over time.
If mini-monsoons in your living room aren’t your thing, you should know that at slower speeds it’s almost completely silent. The big 84″ span of the blades means it’s doesn’t have to spin very fast to move air.
I usually only find out it’s on when my wife gets too cold and tells Alexa to turn it off.
I have both the “Auto Comfort” and “Smarter Cooling” settings turned on, so it works in tandem with our Nest thermostats to keep our house feeling cooler and uses it’s sensor on the bottom to detect when people are in the room, turning itself on an off as needed.
In time, I’ll explain all of this to my wife, who is chronically in a state of feeling cold. I’m currently enjoying her bewilderment at who keeps turning it on.
We don’t have a lot of other lighting in our living room, so we opted for the additional LED attachment. In the living room, I like to have the option of really bright lights to brighten the room up on cloudy days, and at almost 1300 lumens this does the job well. It also dims all the way down to 3%, which works well when we’re winding down and watching some TV in the evenings.
If you use Alexa, you can link it and control both the lighting and fan speed independently like you would any other smart devices. This comes in handy when you’re creating routines.
If you’re new to smart home tech, routines are where you group multiple devices to operate at once with a single command. For example, when I say “Alexa, Good Morning” it turns on all the lights between our bedroom and our kitchen, tells us the morning weather, turns the fan on it’s lowest setting, and starts brewing our coffee.
Aside from Alexa, you can control the fan with both it’s app or remote.
The app is straight forward and intuitive to use, but has deeper features for people like me who want to customize it. Aside from connecting it to work with Nest thermostats, you can set a weekly schedule for it, which allows to set your own routines without using Alexa. This lets you set the fan and light to turn on or off, at your preferred speed, multiple times per day to fit your schedule.
If you’re going to be installing it in your bedroom, it even has a separate sleep mode where you set your ideal temperature for sleeping, and it adjusts throughout the night to keep you comfortable.
The only area I could find to improve it were if they were to offer an additional 5000k color temperature light along side their 2500k one.
The fan as seen here isn’t cheap at around $1800 after you include the additional light kit, tax and shipping, but neither are the features.
I mentioned it at the beginning of this post, but I’m a big fan of this big fan (sorry, I had to).
It does everything I want and more, so it doesn’t leave much to be desired.
One last note for the those who want the most airflow possible is that the aluminum version can move up to 25% more air than the bamboo versions in the largest 84″ size. The different is much less at smaller sizes. I don’t have an official answer yet as to why, but it again may come down to it being easier to balance the aluminum blades than wood ones. Either way, the 15,378 CFM coming from the bamboo version is still more than I could find from any other wood fan online.
Haiku provided me the fan free of charge. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
Nice! Your Haiku fan looks great in your space.