Cooling Fans for Sweaty Dummies

Where's that wall plug, Kurt?

One of our staffers here at the Antisocial Network regularly checks our entries to make certain they're up to date. He's the one responsible for the blue "Leaf Group has deleted..." footnotes and the red entries in all those Dumbasses by Name pages. He also reminds us when it's been a while since we featured a serial dumbass, which is why – five months since his last appearance – eight-time DotD Kurt Schanaman is back. This time, it's for his HomeSteady.com article "How to Make a 12 Volt Cooling Fan Run Backwards."¹

The grammatical errors in the title aren't Schanaman's, but the rest of the post lies at his feet (with an assist from a nameless eHow.com content editor, we suspect). Kurt's ignorance of the question at hand shows up in his first sentence:

"Cooling fans are capable of drawing cool air into a room, and some are manufactured with a reverse polarity to draw warm air away from a room."

Schanaman gets the cart before the horse with that "reverse polarity" bit. In point of fact, exhaust fans don't need to be manufactured with reverse polarity: you can change a fan from cooling to exhaust by reversing the tilt on the blades while the motor still runs in the same direction. But, let's get to the question at hand...
Schanaman attempts to address a fan that is fixed in place and whose housing and blades cannot be changed. He attacks the problem by reversing the polarity of the leads (this will work for some fans, but not all), which will make the motor run in the opposite direction. His instructions, however, have problems...

• 1: Unplug your 12-volt fan's power cable from its power source. – Apparently, he thinks a 12-volt fan has a power cord like the fan in his bedroom window...
• 2: Cut the power cord completely through, at two feet from the connector plug, using a wire cutter. – He's trying to cannibalize instructions for rewiring a 110-volt appliance: what 12-volt fan has a "power cord" at least two feet long?
• 3 - 7 – Cribbed instructions for splicing lamp cord...
• 8: Inspect your work. The two wires on the wall-plug portion of the power cable should be crossed over, or reversed, and the wires on the fan portion of the power cable should remain straight as they always have been. – Ummm, Kurt? 12-volt fans don't plug into the wall...

In the real world, people who know what they're talking about would suggest that the OQ swap the spade plugs at either the fan motor or the power source or, if that's not possible, do the cut-and-swap thing on the wires where possible. Whatever the case, it's a sure bet from that "wall plug" bull that our Dumbass of the Day had no idea what he was talking about...

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_5623089_make-cooling-fan-run-backwards.html

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