Become a new fan (of a fan)?

The power of YouTube, when an influencer does a 15 minute video of "the newest finds at Aldi for this month!" and you go to the store to check out some of the items.

We ended up with the $7.99 "Ambiano 5 Inch Rechargeable Fan". 

It comes in either white or black, and we chose white.

The fan comes with instructions and a USB-C cable (but not a brick).

As you can see by the pictures above, the fan can be moved in various ways to fill the space with air. 

It's pretty silent and has three speeds: low, medium and high. There's a timer mode for one, two or four hours. The instructions do say that each of different speeds will also drain the battery a certain percentage. Meaning, on any given speed, you have between 4 and 12 hours if you're not using the timer specifically. 

Quite honestly, after seeing the video, we intended on purchasing it because we want to have it in our hurricane kit, should we lose power during a storm (if we get a storm. Not that we want a hurricane to come here and do anything problematic, but in the event we have an issue and lose power, at least we can stay cool for a couple hours). Lesson learned during Ian when it was still so hot in October. We tried to stay as low as we could. Still warm air is not your friend. Therefore, if we get something before September this year, it'll be brutal. It has been hitting triple digits over the past few weeks. All we need is to lose electricity during a normal day and we'll be swimming in our own sweat. We don't need a storm to add to that. 

Regardless of circumstance, I think it'll be a good thing to keep around. When we brought it home, I tested it out. It comes pre-charged, so that's pretty cool (literally and figuratively). Whatever speed you have it on, it does give off enough of an oomph, that you can sit comfortably on the couch or wherever you want, and face it towards you or the ceiling. You'll definitely get some nice air and not regret it. Due to this being a five inch machine, it's not going to cool your entire home, but it'll send a breeze in the direction you put it in. I wouldn't put it in a corner and expect it across the room, but if you put it on a coffee table near you and let it go, you'll not be so hot.

I tried to search for it on Amazon to see what the AtoZ store would sell it for. Like the Crofton Cold Brew System, the Ambiano doesn't exist. Amazon has other fans for sale, and they range in price from $7.99 and go up past $15. I noticed the site has fans that are on a flexible tripod base. 

I have seen Joby tripods for cameras if you want to go outdoors with your photoshoot and put the camera on a tree or fence or whatever. 

So the fan on one of these tripods is actually kind of interesting. Aldi sells their brand of the flexible tripod base as well, but I didn't notice the price. 

I think this is probably one of the better additions to our kit. We do have an array of "essentials", but we learned the hard way what 10 days of warmth can do to you when you are "trapped" in your house. At least we can now run this for an hour at a time and cool off. We wouldn't leave it running all day or night, especially since we wouldn't be able to charge it, so we would have to be careful on using it.

No, I'm not turning my car on and wasting gas to be able to recharge it.

The only way I think we could not worry, would be if one of the neighbors had a generator and allowed us to plug in some of our backup stuff (battery chargers for the phones, etc). Do a trade - either pay them for the gas in the generator, share our food /  disposables, whatever we can do, in order to use their generator juice. Much like when the neighbors banded together in 2022 - we shared everything and nothing was expected in return. Because you take care of each other. So maybe it could be the same if we end up losing power during another storm.

Again, we don't want any problems, so hurricanes stay away. Even category ones need not apply. We have enough problems during normal rains with flooding, we don't need strong winds. 

Nope.

Hopefully we won't have to rely on this device, but it might be nice to just take it out of the box during the summer (or year) just to have it going anyway. Why let it sit and collect dust? It might be useful to put it in the kitchen for when my mother wants to make hamburgers (or other meat) on the stovetop grill pan and we then need to get the smoke out of the house because she seared the moomoos too much. As it is, I have a "Nantucket Breeze" fan in my room and we have to unplug that in order to use it in the kitchen as a fumigating service. This smaller one might be easier to handle as well as able to move around better. 

Worth a shot.

Until we figure out another use, like we'd write in our yearbooks, "Keep Kool Kid because Keepin Kool Kounts"

Yeah, we weren't the brightest bulbs in the batch...

Cheers;