The Minton: Ideas and Renovation – 14 – Everything Electrical (II)

One home renovation mistake we made with our first home at the Rivervale was not installing ceiling fans. We thought we’d do fine with standing fans at the onset – and it didn’t take long before we realized how much we’d underestimated our island’s general humidity levels. Oh, our current home is still reasonably cool on the overall, but Hannah/Peter’s room at the back of the house faces part of the afternoon sun, and it takes a while for their room to cool down in the evening. There are as many as eight standing fans among the rooms at our place. Imagine the amount of cable clutter on the floor, and worse still is many of these fans started breaking down in the usual ways after a year.  Granted, we routinely went for the cheapo NTUC Fairprice models, but still.

In any case, we learned our lesson for our new home @ The Minton. This time round, it’d be ceiling fans all the way! Like many other home owners renovating their new place, we faced the usual considerations on our choice of which ceiling fans, like:

• Numerous fan brands sold in Singapore, different place of motor manufacture, different class of motors
• Room sizes
• Whether the fan color and style blends well with the intended interior design
• Whether the fan needs to come equipped with light kits
• Whether the fan speed should be remote-controlled, via a pull chain switch, or via a wall regulator

Of the whole bunch of well-known ceiling fan brands here – e.g. KDK, Relite, Amasco, Fanco, Crestar – the grandfather among these, in terms of apparent reliability anyway, is KDK. Looking at general online opinion, many home owners regard KDK fans as reliable, established, and long-lasting. Unfortunately, their designs are also somewhat limited, and for want of better word, functional. Ling’s reaction is even cuter. She said that she looks at KDK-styled fans everyday in her classrooms, and doesn’t want to see them too at home LOL. Moreover, this brand’s fans are also sold much cheaper across the causeway than here, but we’re not about to drive over to pick up a bunch of them – warranty issues and the like – so KDK fans were dropped from our consideration.

Of the remaining brands, we thought the Amasco fans looked pretty alright after checking out their range at Lightings.com.sg @ Jalan Besar over the weekend. Our designer shared that one of his previous clients installed an Italian-designed fan distributed by this company that would fit nicely into our (very) small study room – the Vento Fino 13. The fan cost a bit of a bomb though, powerful as it is, but it was an interesting little appliance to consider nonetheless. However, online opinion of Amasco fans seemed mixed, and that certainly made us think again whether to go with this brand of fans.

Next up were Crestar and Fanco fans. Online opinion seems quite favorable, with many noting that both brands offer a wide range of designs, sizes and optional accessories. The motors in Crestar fans, as one shop owner told us, are made in Taiwan, while Fanco’s are in China. We checked out the Crestar range at the very well-known electrical appliance shop Tai Yong (also situated along Jalan Besar, and also where we picked up a bunch of lights for the front balcony, our master bedroom, and also the home shelter), liked what we saw, noted selections for each room, and got quotations for all of them. We had somewhat more complex requirements for our workroom though – not a big room + false ceiling + LED downlights – and the Crestar range didn’t have anything that checked the tick boxes here, so we had to look elsewhere.

One big decision we have to make too is how the fan should be controlled. This is especially significant for the two rooms where light kits for the fans will be installed – specifically our children’s room, and also the study. Routinely, most fans by design can be controlled via a pull chain switch, but we don’t like the idea of having chains dangling from the base of the fan. So, we are down to between wall regulators and remote controllers. Remote controllers are of course convenient, but these require care and are naturally fragile – e.g. how many of us have dropped our remote controllers. And we’ve had bad experiences with remote controllers over the course of our using electrical appliances in general. True, many home owners routinely dispose and buy new electrical appliances every few years and get new packaged controllers, but ceiling fans are more permanent fixtures and most certainly not easily replaceable by normal home owners.

Wall-regulators have their own challenges too. Basically, when coupled with a light kit, extra wire cabling needs to be laid  down to allow for the additional switch. Unless one’s alright with seeing extra cable trunking running along the ceiling and wall, these should typically be laid during the main renovation of a new home – which in turn means that the contractor or designer needs to be advised early on and the costs of laying that extra cables factored in.

And finally, there are also exotic fans. Like the widely admired and envied Haiku fans and Spinfans. These premium-designed fans though are priced accordingly, and one could easily get 2 to 3 reliable normal fans for their asking price of one. Money for the both of us doesn’t grow on trees, so nope, we had to drop these from consideration too, if reluctantly LOL.

We’re about decided on our fans after thinking through our options, and will be blogging on our choices very soon – after we buy them in a bit.:)