Ceiling Fan Components

Series Summary

The first motorized ceiling fan was invented in 1862 by an American named Philip Diehl. Before that fans were powered mostly by running water that turned a turbine. Of course there was stiff competition after his invention was such a success but Diehl kept improving upon his fan adding two more blades to his initial two and by the 1920’s the ceiling fan became almost a staple in every household in America. Not only were they relatively cheap but they kept energy costs down by circulating air much cheaper than central air. This was especially beneficial during the Great Depression. Although few new fans were sold during this time the ones already in circulation were able to help alleviate, even in a small way, the financial burdens of the country.

In this video series you will learn how to install your own ceiling fan from beginning to end. Our expert home inspector will walk you through the parts and tools needed as well as the wiring and even how to fix a wobble in the fan. There are multiple steps and parts but each is fully covered and detailed. Let this series make light work of what could seem like a heavy job!

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Drew Finn and I'm here for expertvillage.com. I'm a professional home inspector and I am going to be showing you how to install a ceiling fan today. We are going to go through what the components. We have unpacked the box, spread them out and made sure we had everything; the main motor drive assembly, the hanging bracket that will go up on the ceiling attached to the box. This is a canopy that will go up and attach to here and we've got the extension. Depending on your installation, either we will have no extension, the long one or the short one and we will discuss planning that. Just to cover for the vase here we have the screws, the mounting brackets for and will go in here that the blade will attach to. So those are the basic components we have that came with it. We also have a mounting box that will be attached to the ceiling and that is about it for the components. What we need to do is for instance on the paddle fans on this particular brand, you can install them with the texture down or just say you see a plain wood. So we will pre-assemble parts of this which I am going to show you step by step how to do and be all prepared to demount it. What we will do is we will have this attached here and then the blades are going to be the last thing we put on up above. I will show you down here how to put them on so that it is a little clearer. If any process particularly the wiring aspect of it, you feel very uncomfortable hire a licensed electrician to wire it. I will show you exactly how to do it but you've got to feel comfortable doing it and I can't emphasize enough read the instructions thoroughly before you start. Okay, great! So we'll get going on the next step."