Product review (2 stars): A great fan until it wasn't...VERY easy for my fan to become a racket of noise. Amazing concept, fragile unit?
I'm hoping I'll be able to change this review after I get in contact with the company for a new one.

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Summary:
Maybe this is rare. Maybe just my unit even. My fan worked perfectly for a couple months into the winter. I really got used to it moving the air around the house without electricity and managing to stay almost silent. Unfortunately the quiet factor went out the window when I needed to move it to a new spot. In the process of rotating it a few times, gently setting it down, picking it back up and putting it in its old spot the blades loosened along the neck. It now sounds like someone banging pots together extremely fast if it is not at full speed and wakes me up :(
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I liked this fan...heck, I LOVED it at first. I even got one for my neighbors as a present! Theirs even works on a very old soapstone stove. But it does work best with metal contact. Not necessarily making modern stoves better for the fan - the higher the temp, the more noticeable the noise

Everything was going good with my fan. I read complaints that it didn't work at all - but eventually realized once I had the fan myself that these people either had a soapstone stove or something too insulated to transfer heat to the fan. I highly doubt more than 1 in 10000 of these is so defective it won't start. It does start quickly in my stove, even over the draft intake part of it, starting up at barely 150 degrees as read by a stick on
thermometer.

Here's when everything went to heck. My steam pot that I also bought here on amazon arrived and I needed to make room for it and hopefully get the fan to move the steam into our dry living room.

I picked up the fan (it was not moving from heat, mind you) and set it over on its side. When I moved it to its new spot I noticed something subtle - the blade mechanism was able to move just a smidgen along the neck connecting it to the thermal mechanism. I didn't think anything of it at all. That is until I got a fire going. The normally near silent fan was now getting up to speed with an audible CLANK ... CLANK ... CLANK increasing in speed as it got hotter. When it reached peak speed, it wasn't as noticeable, but still above my tolerance level for what I had first unboxed.

Now I get woken up if I'm using the fan on the stove and it cools below a certain speed, which is unbearable. At the same time, some nights I'd still rather "try" to use it because it keeps the hot air from stagnating around the stove where I sleep. But in summary, I'm completely heartbroken that something I thought was sturdy and that I loved so much quit on me. It can't be that fragile, right?
I'm hoping for answers. I did not knock it over, have it drop, etc - it's completely intact and looks no different from fresh out of the box. I simply set it down on its back and it was rendered virtually unusable.