The Schoolyear of Scott

Raise your hand if you’ve even hung a ceiling fan.

Well I have.  Actually, I’ve hung a ceiling fan twice.  One in Atlanta and, more recently, one in my new bedroom this past weekend and let me tell you, it is a pain in the you know what.  Now granted, I am no electrician, but I am semi-handy (as long as the operation is performed the day after college graduation or was bought from IKEA) but ceiling fans are my Kryptonite.

Let’s talk a little bit about them…

When I first moved into my apartment in Atlanta, I quickly decided that I wanted to have a ceiling fan in my bedroom.  You see, for those of you who have never visited in the Summer, Atlanta gets hot.  I would usually run the Air Conditioning at full blast during the Summer months, but in August, that sometimes wouldn’t be enough.  So one day I drove down to Target and, as I did back then with all of my household appliances, I bought the cheapest ceiling fan available…I think it was $20 (if I recall correctly, it was the same day that I had my interview at Toyota in Snellville, GA…an interview that went so well I, no joke, walked out right as it started on the guise that I was going to the bathroom because I realized that it wasn’t, in fact, a “managerial” position, as advertised, but a “car-washing” position).

I installed that particular fan with relative ease…relative being the key word.  It only took me a few hours to complete the project.  I did not have a ladder, you see, so I installed the fan standing on my tippy toes while using my bar stool and bed as a make shift ladder. Once installed, I went to turn the fan on and it made so much noise that I don’t believe I ever turned the fan back on after that day.  On the bright side (pun!), the light on the fan worked so I had light in my bedroom.  Lesson learned: don’t buy a $20 ceiling fan again.

Fast forward to last week.  I went to Lowe’s Hardware with my dad so that I could help him pick out a new refrigerator and he could help me pick out a ceiling fan (over three months after moving here and my only light in my bedroom was a small desk lamp).  I splurged and went with the $60 ceiling fan, which you can see in the picture above.  This time I had a step stool and tools and I was sure that this installation would be much easier than the Atlanta installation.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I set out to install the fan Friday afternoon.  I pushed my bed up against the wall, set up the step stool and began the installation.  It actually started off very well.  I was able to put the mounting bracket in with ease and hook the motor up to the bracket fairly quickly as well.  It wasn’t until the wiring aspect of the installation that problems began.

My ceiling outlet had Black, Red, White and Green wires coming out from it.  The fan had Black, Blue, White, Green and Green coming from it.  Yes, there were two greens.  Greens are (almost?) always the Ground, so I was unsure as to why there were two of them but I just went with it.  The instruction manual said to hook the Black with Black, White with White, Green with Green  and Blue with Blue.  Now, almost immediately, my instincts kicked in.  I wondered what of the other Green wire and what of the Red wire.  My best hypothesis was to connect all the Greens and to pretend the Red was Blue and connect the two of them together.

At this point, during the connect the wires portion of the installation, my height became an issue.  I am 5’7″.  Even on the step ladder, I was still having trouble reaching the very top of the ceiling.  To make matters harder, the wires from the ceiling were super short and I couldn’t get the right position to connect them.  So I was stuck.

In comes my dad to save the day.  He’s 6’2″ so he had the height advantage, plus, he actually knows what he is doing when it comes to wiring.  Well, even with him here, it wasn’t super easy.  The short wires were causing a problem with him, and then screwing the fan panels on became an issue because it was tiny screws that we were having to find holes for while our view was obstructed.  In fact, we even had to call in my uncle to help hold the screws (and find them when they were inevitably dropped) while I held the fan panels and my dad tried to screw them.  Even then, it became difficult because the fan panels kept hitting my dad in the head…the curse of being too tall.

How many Gold’s does it take to install a fan?  It took us about three more hours, but we finally got the fan installed and properly working.

Now my question is this:  Why does this process have to be so difficult?  When you install the light portion of the ceiling fan, all of the wires are combined into a plug and you just insert the male plug into the female plug.  It takes seconds, not hours.  There is no reason why this cannot be done in regards to the fan.  In fact, if any engineers are reading this, you can steal my idea and I won’t even make you give me any percentage of your profits…I would be so happy that the installation process was simplified that it would be payment enough.  So please, get to work.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.