Sycamore Uno Modern Ceiling Fan in Brushed Steel 52"

I have had thus fan for yesrs. completely silent airfliw, mesmerusng to watch.It's pricey, but it's functional art.

Update Jan 23 2024: I added to my leviton fan control review how you can decrease the gap between the "max" and "hi" settings. See there if interested.Update May 9 2023: The capacitor-based speed control from China finally arrived. It turns out to have capacitor values 3.2, 4.2, 5.1 and 6.0 uF, versus the Leviton with 5, 7, and 12 uF. The 12 uF Leviton value already seems quite low to me, and I would think that the values of the Chinese control would be more suitable to 220 VAC countries like China and Europe, where comparable uF values might be roughly 4 times smaller than in the USA. So I am throwing the Chinese control away.Update April 24 2023: I found that the "Leviton RTF01-10W Illumatech Quiet [wall] Fan Speed Control" *is* in fact capacitor based (although they do not tell you that), and with it, my UNO fan is now completely silent at all speeds! For more, see my review of that fan control.There are not many reviews of this fan, but I will make up for it. I will first explain why I think this fan is interesting, then discuss its properties, and finally installation issues.When searching for a replacement for my old, ugly, cheap ceiling fan, I hit upon the UNO, the US version of the "Sycamore Ceiling Fan". For a theoretical aerodynamicist like me, this unique, aerodynamically designed fan was really irresistible. It is inspired by the winged seed pods (samaras) of maple trees like the "(pseudo) Sycamore" Maple. These seed pods rotate when they fall to the ground, slowing them down, much like the rotating rotor of an autogyrating helicopter slows its fall down. The slower descent allows any available wind to carry the seeds far away, to where the seed does not have to compete with its parent's root system. (See the Wikipedia article on "Acer Pseudoplatanus" for more.) The shape of such a maple tree samara loosely inspired the blade of the "Sycamore" Ceiling Fan. But the fan blade has some notable aerodynamic improvements (like airfoil-type cross sections).Pics 1 and 2 show the fan as installed below the cathedral ceiling of my living room. I would have preferred a different finish for the UNO, as I do not think there are many maples whose seedlings come in a brushed aluminum color. I tentatively asked here on amazon whether the blade could be painted, but apparently the seller recommends *in general* that fans not be painted, as the weight of the paint may upset the blade balancing. Now if for *normal* fan blades, painting is a bad idea for balancing, then it must be disastrous for the UNO blade. Normal fan blades are rotationally symmetric, so the weights of the paint on different blades mostly cancel each other out. That is obviously not true for the UNO.To my (considerable) surprise however, the brushed chrome works quite well with the brown that I use for trim in my house interior, as seen in the pics. You might think of the fan as hanging from a brown tree branch. I did consider painting the motor cover also brown (which should be OK) but decided against it. Note that the ceiling beam came with my house as I bought it. The down-beam however was made by my handyman especially for the UNO fan. Instead, you can simply buy a ready-made down-rod for the UNO fan, but I definitely prefer my own down-beam.The UNO has no light in it, like my old fan. (I did not want any, as I wanted more distributed lighting, without hard shadows. And I certainly did not want a build-in LED that makes you install a whole new fan when its light fails, which LEDs seem to do just as quickly as incandescents in my experience.) But whoever build my house did include the *wiring* for a light (and even separate wall switches for it), in the fan wiring. So my handyman branched this wiring for a light towards two places lower down the ceiling, allowing us to install the two (dimmable) chandeliers that you see in pics 1 and 2. The bulbs are at the same height above the ground as the fan blade: the 8.5 feet recommended by energystar.gov for optimal fan airflow.According to the UNO sales literature somewhere, the fan is "electrically reversible". This turns out to mean that on the motor cover, near the top, there is a switch, and if you move this switch the other way, the direction of rotation of the blade reverses. Why would you want to do that? Well, normally the principal thing that a fan does to keep you cool in summer is produce air motion. The moving air dries your sweat, and that is a very effective way to cool you down. In particular, normally a fan gathers air from above it and blasts it down at relatively high speed in a fairly localized downward jet which spreads out closer to the ground. Just what is needed.But there is another thing the fan does: Hot air is lighter than cold air, so hot air will normally rise towards the ceiling. Especially for a cathedral ceiling like mine, the air will normally be quite hot just below the ceiling, and a lot cooler closer to the ground. Ask my handyman. This is actually an advantage of cathedral ceilings for short-term episodes of heat: the incoming hot air mostly goes to the ceiling area, away from people on the ground. But for sustained heat conditions, you probably do not want a vertical temperature gradient with hot air on top. The fan also helps with this: it circulates the air from ceiling area to ground *and* back: if the fan send ceiling air to the ground at its location, then other air must go back to the ceiling elsewhere to "fill the gap". Your A/C can now get hold of the ceiling air and cool it down so that the same pleasant cool air exists throughout the room.That becomes much more important during winter. Normally during winter the nice hot air, that you spend a fortune on electricity on to create, is sitting near the ceiling, while you sit shivering in the cold air near the ground. Running the fan will bring that hot air down to you on the ground. However, in winter you would presumably not want air motion to cool you down (and dry your skin) like in summer. The solution is to reverse the direction of rotation of the fan. Then the relatively high velocity jet will be send to the ceiling instead of to the ground, and air velocities near the ground will be everywhere low.At 5 ft 6, I need at least a small 3-step ladder to reach the forward/reverse switch on the UNO where it is. But since I would be doing this at most two times a year, it is OK. It would not be a good idea to do the reversal electrically at the wall speed control, as swapping the hot and neutral leads would be disastrous if someone (now or in the future) used the same leads for a light, like I already do.The UNO comes with a generic remote, including a button for the nonexisting light (unless you put the light elsewhere, like I do with my chandeliers). But I prefer wall controls. A wall control I know where to find, and needs no battery. A remote control, who knows where it is gone to and why the battery leaked. So we reused the continuously-variable fan wall speed control from my old fan.However, we observed a curious thing with this setup: When the fan is turned on at full speed, it is extremely quiet. As if it is not doing anything. It is only when you step straight below the fan that you discover that the fan is actually producing quite a strong jet downward; a lot stronger than my old fan. Still, there is no airflow noise that I can hear at all. (The aerodynamically designed airfoil cross sections of the blade are responsible for that.)So far, excellent. Even the motor is very quiet. But when I turn the fan speed down at my wall control, immediately a distinct motor hum appears and gets more pronounced the more I turn down the speed. It is not a loud noise, and was probably the same with my old fan, so it is not such a big deal. But if I have an extremely quiet fan blade, I would also like the motor to be very quiet, to impress the neighbors.Now the "Troubleshooting" section of the UNO installation instructions has, under "Fan makes noise", an entry "Variable speed control (dimmer) in circuit". My existing fan speed control was definitely *not* a (light) dimmer; it said "fan speed control right on its front metal plate. (I had actually brought up this question with customer support when I called them with installation questions, and received an answer that seemed somewhat ambiguous to me. But at the time my concern was with getting the thing correctly installed in the first place, so I ignored it then.)After installation, the undesired motor hum set me exploring the issue on the internet. It turns out that a continuously variable fan speed control like mine is what is called a "leading-edge phase-cut dimmer". Basically it is a simple electronic device, and at least one was already on the market in 1961, before my house was build. What it actually does is simple: it constantly cuts the power to the fan, then quickly restores it again. You could do the same thing with the fan power switch, constantly flipping it on and off, never giving the fan enough time on to reach full speed. Obviously this works. But the result would be some noise, not just from you flipping the switch all the time (for a realistic simulation you would have to flip it 240 times per second), but also from the motor itself, constantly slowing down, then speeding up again, and so on. More or less like rocking the motor back and forth, hence motor hum.To avoid this noise, what you want is that the power going to the fan is *always* reduced *proportionally*, not just sometimes cut off and at other times full blast. You can achieve this easily by putting a so-called "resistor" in the live electrical wire going to the fan. A resistor is like an obstacle course for the electrons of the current going towards the fan. In going through the resistor, these electrons constantly bounce off obstacles in their path. Now these electrons have an energy called voltage, and all these obstacles cause them to lose a lot of this energy going through the resistor. As a simple example, if you size the resistor to be just as big an obstacle as the motor itself, then the electrons will have only half their energy left when arriving finally at the motor. Also, being, effectively, slowed down, only half as many will arrive at the motor in a given time interval as before. The effect is that they will only be able to provide the motor one quarter the power as before.Apparently, this has actually been done in the past; a suitable variable resistor is called a "rheostat". It should work fine for the hum, but it has some new issues. First of all, you pay for the initial energy of the electrons to the electricity company. In the given example, while the motor produces only one quarter of its full power, and correspondingly uses only one quarter of its full electrical energy, in the *resistor* the electrons now lose an equal amount of energy as in the motor, and you have to pay for that too. Your power went down by a factor four, but your electric bill only by a factor two. OK, fans do not use that much energy in the first place, but more importantly, that wasted energy in the resistor comes out as heat. When the resistor is in, say, a closed wall-control electric box where the heat has difficulty escaping, the temperature might get high enough to ignite something, be it solid or vapor. The result would provide your neighbors with a rare and exciting opportunity to actually watch a house fire up close. But if you spend a lot of time and money fixing that house, you might have difficulty sharing their excitement.Now if the electrical power that the city provides was like that of a battery, that would be the end of it. But utility power is "Alternating Current", which means that alternatingly, the electrons go one direction through the wires, then the other. For alternating currents, a so-called "capacitor" can do much the same as a resistor. But while a resistor is like an obstacle course for the electrons on their way to the motor, a capacitor is more like a motel. A lot of electrons take a break at the motel on their way, so once again a lot less electrical energy reaches the motor in a given time than before. But the electrons do not lose any significant energy staying at a good motel; they come out refreshed, pretty much as energetic as before. So long, bad wasted energy and heat problems!So I concluded that what I needed was a *capacitor-based* fan control. And then I found that apparently you can no longer get such an animal in the entire USA! There are instructions to make them yourself, but the only ready-made one that I could find was on Ebay, listed as "Capacitive *Vintage* Ceiling Fan Speed Control", and it had to be sent to me from China! I guess motor noise is not a big issue for fan control makers? Anyway, I do hope that the "vintage" control will eliminate the motor hum. I plan to update this review as soon as it arrives and I can get it installed as my wall control, if ever.(The remote-control receiver that comes with the UNO might well have capacitors inside, for all I know. I guess I would have to break open the plastic box to see. But I would like a real wall control if possible.)The final property of the UNO fan I will discuss is its performance specifications. Despite what others may tell you, the most important specification is how far the fan blade extends outward from the center of the motor. For the UNO that is 27 inch. In my case, it cannot be much more than that because otherwise the fan would start interacting significantly with the chandeliers at 55 inch. (Pics 1 and 2 are slightly tele, so the chandeliers look closer to the fan than they really are.)How about cubic feet moved per minute (CFM), Watts used, and "efficiency" (their ratio), you ask? Me too. I have found conflicting numbers for these. However, on the box that the motor came in was an "FTC Energy Guide" sticker, see pic 3, and presumably no one would want to lie on a government sticker. The FTC sticker has 2952 CFM, 32 W, and 92 CFM/W. However, these numbers are qualified as "Estimates based on typical use". The manufacturer put another sticker on the box marked "At high speed". That sticker has 4709 CFM, 47 W, and 101 CFM/W. These are quite respectable numbers for a fan of this size (and especially for a single fan blade of this size).However, the seller, Dan's Fan City, on its UNO web page, lists under "Airflow and dimensions" 6488 CFM, 91.2 W, and 71.1 CFM/W. I would guess that this is a mistake, and that these numbers are for a different, bigger (seeing CFM), cheaper (seeing efficiency) fan. (In principle a bigger fan can always be more "efficient" than a smaller one, as you have to give less kinetic energy to the air if you move a bigger area of it. That is the principle of the turbofan aircraft engine.) Under "Overview" on the same web page, the correct high-speed values are listed.The Amazon UNO web page lists under "Product Info" 78.7 W. Maybe a VA value??Anyway, looking at "efficiency" is an exercise in futility. Do you really care whether the thing uses $9 (FTC sticker) or $10 per year to run if it can save anything perceivable on your yearly heating and cooling costs? You might of course wonder whether the UNO fan should not be noticeably more efficient than any other fan, since its blade is so well designed. But obviously the blade cannot make motor friction disappear. Worse, even a theoretical *ideal* fan blade of a given CFM and size must still use some power *itself*, as unavoidably such a blade must still give a nonzero amount of kinetic energy to the air passing through.Finally, installation. Installation is not that difficult, relatively speaking, if you know what you are doing. And in general the provided instructions are fine. But there are some issues that you should be aware of. When I called the seller's support department with these issues on a mid afternoon, I got through right away without waiting in any line, and the support person was very helpful, spending quite some time with me. But if you can figure it out yourself, why not?First, the bolt that holds the blade to the motor is not in the blade as the instructions say, but in a separate plastic baggie, with a spare. And it does not look like the picture in that it has a thin plastic covering (and some Locktite titen at its tip). Presumably these changes are to prevent it from coming loose. It cannot fall out, as there is a metal cover, but I guess you don't want the thing to rattle.Second, the motor cover will be attached to the motor with three small screws. Two of these screws can already be loosely screwed in when you attach the cover, as they go into slotted holes, but the third can only be screwed in after you have placed the cover. The instructions misstate which screw that is. What actually determines which is the third screw is the position of the forward/reverse switch on the motor cover mentioned earlier. It must go over two corresponding switches on the motor.Third, and that is what really got me, was how to attach the motor to its hanging bracket. The motor has a half sphere that you are supposed to shove into the hanging bracket so that a tab on the hanging bracket goes into a slot on the sphere. I told the support person that there was no way in heck I could do that without taking some cables and a capacitor loose. While I was waiting on the line for him to consult with the technical department, my handyman came in, so I asked him to try. He did it! Eventually, I figured out the trick myself. You have to shove the motor on the bracket 90 degrees counter-clockwise from its final position. Then rotate it 90 degrees clockwise and the tab will fall into the slot.After the actual installation by my handyman, there was a rattle when the fan was turned on. So we took the thing apart again to look. Remember that third screw that you can only screw in later? It has a square rubber washer, presumably against vibration, and that washer had fallen down and was rattling around. My handyman managed to keep it into place on his second attempt. While doing all this, he also noted and corrected a cable zip tie that he felt could be a bit tighter.During installation, I did insist that my handyman roped the fan blade to the ceiling before screwing it to the motor. If the blade would fall down and get dented, not only would that upset the airflow; it would also upset the factory balancing of the blade. This blade is an expensive piece of engineering.