When it’s scorching outside, who doesn’t love cranking up the ceiling fan? But did you know ceiling fans can also help keep your home toasty during the winter and save you money on energy bills? It’s true! And the best part is, you can unlock their potential with just a simple flick of a switch.
How Does Reverse Mode on a Ceiling Fan Work?
In summer, ceiling fans remove the warm air from around our bodies to create a wind-chill effect and cool us down. In winter, they can help redistribute the warm air around a room. Chris Barnes, an indoor heating expert from consumer group Choice, says reverse or winter mode is an increasingly common inclusion on ceiling fans.
“I think it still escapes a lot of people’s notice that this feature even exists,” Mr. Barnes says.
“Warm air collects at the top of the room — hot air rises — and [in cold weather] you want to get that warmer air back down to floor level where the people are. Reverse mode [works] by drawing air up, it creates a general airflow pattern where that warm air that’s collected near the ceiling gets forced away from the ceiling, back down to floor level.”
This redistribution of warm air can dramatically change the overall ambient temperature of a room and make it a few degrees warmer than it otherwise would be.
How Can You Tell if Your Fan Has Reverse Mode?
If you have purchased a ceiling fan in the past few years, Mr. Barnes says it’s “almost certainly going to have reverse mode.”
If your ceiling fan has a wall switch or cord attached to turn it off or on, there will often be a switch on the fan itself, above the blade, but you may need a stepladder to find it. If you have a remote-controlled fan, the button should be clearly labeled.
“If you’ve got really old ceiling fans that are maybe 20 or 30 years old, they may not have it, but [more recent fans are] almost certainly going to have this feature,” Mr. Barnes says.
Turning Up the Heat
Electric heaters are one of the most effective ways of heating a room when it’s cold, but they are also one of the most expensive. Using your ceiling fan in reverse mode while you run a heater not only helps circulate warm air throughout a room, it can also allow you to use the heater more sparingly.
Although using reverse mode on your ceiling fan together with a reverse-cycle air conditioner has some benefit, Mr. Barnes says the difference is less pronounced than when using a heater because air conditioners “have got their own fans for distributing the air around.”
“An electric heater or an oil column heater combined with the reverse mode on the ceiling fan that’s in the room is going to deliver noticeably better effects than just using the heater on its own,” Mr. Barnes says.
“You’ll probably be able to run the heater at a lower setting, which will make it cheaper to run and you might not need to run it as often. Overall, you’re going to end up using less electricity, even though you’re [also] running a fan, because the ceiling fan itself is dirt cheap to run.”
