10 Responses to “Dyson Bladeless Fan for Rich People Who Hate Blades”

1. Lurklen Posted: Oct 14th, 2009 at 3:07 pm

   1 Yeah I’ve always wanted a dyson vacuum but they’re just so expensive. It’s become one of those situations where if you want to buy products that are good for the environment you gotta have a big wallet.

2. John Posted: Oct 14th, 2009 at 11:42 pm

   2 Dyson really doesn’t produce anything for anyone that NEEDS their level of products. Anyone who would buy this likely has central air, and would only use this to lower costs. Instead, in a few years cheap knockoffs will be available for more cost conscious consumers, much like the vacuums are being duplicated now. Still, the fan is awesome, like most Dyson products are.

3. Kyle Posted: Oct 15th, 2009 at 12:22 am

   3 It makes me wonder, we use ceiling fans in almost every room. If the cost could come down, they might have a use there. I’d much rather have the cool looking ring (that sounds more energy efficient) than the bulky fans we have. Just a thought.

4. Cortharis Posted: Oct 15th, 2009 at 9:38 am

   4 His hand dryers that this is built on don’t work as well. It’s not a quick process and doesn’t leave your hands comfortably warmed. I fear it could also hurt elderly peoples in the process too since it’s a hard jet. As for this fan, it means less fun watching the cats attack the reflections from the blades. Dyson is trying to ruin my amusement. @ Kyle; Most ceiling fans are used to circulate air and moisture and either to pull it from the ground or push warm air down to force cool air up. And does anyone know if this is really more environmentally friendly? It’s still made of plastic no? Should it no be made of bamboo or another material? What’s the turbine made of? How did they get the copper for wiring? It’s all fine and dandy to say it’s environmentally friendly but what about the process the sum of the parts went into?

5. Drezz Posted: Oct 15th, 2009 at 9:41 am

   5 I often wonder how Dyson comes up with the cash for the R & D on his products. The ideas are brilliant, and they’re true feats of engineering ingenuity, but if he’s charging 3x the amount for an appliance that is made with parts that are worth almost the exact same as a regular unit, either his company is making huge profit margins using cheap tech or they really need to set a high price point to cover costs. Everyone talks about how great the Dyson tech is, but how many people do you know actually have it? The regular joe wouldn’t bother investing 3-4 hundred on a vac when they can get the same mileage out of a 100 dollar one. It makes me think that Dyson has some huge venture capital backing and any money he makes off his inventions and products goes straight back into their coffers.

6. Kevin Posted: Oct 15th, 2009 at 10:57 am

   6 One of the fun things about something being “environmentally friendly” is that it’s pretty much just an advertisement gimmick now, similar to “all natural ingredients”. The vast majority of people that are “environmentally conscious” know precisely jack shit about the production of the things they buy (case in point) . I seem to recall something about the environmental effect of the new (at the time) Prius pointing out that just because it’s got good millage doesn’t mean it’s good for the environment. On an interesting side note, did you know that you can use a refrigerator to heat your home? Refrigerators (and air conditioners) work by moving the heat from one location to the other, but since this takes energy, the heat output is higher than the heat intake. The insulation is what keeps the heat from moving back, so if you just leave the door open a refrigerator will heat your home. Now you know, (I hear from a very reliable source that the other half is shooting your opponent).

7. Kunoichi Posted: Oct 15th, 2009 at 2:16 pm

   7 Kevin, your “case in point” article is disingenuous. It treats the “pros” of the various activities as single-layered, even while given all the various “cons”. It fails to acknowledge that, for example, while the practice of something might *currently* not be helpful, by creating a consumer environment where it is standard, *then* it will be good. And some of the cons are just plain misleading. Such as that we’ve “increased the number of trees over the last 50 years”. Well, that’s rather misleading. Because most of the deforestation outside of S. America happened before 50 years ago, whereas rain forest deforestation is still happening, and is extremely dangerous. Not only that, that’s where a lot of the wood for paper products comes from these days. I’m particularly amused by the “1000″ times con of the coffee mug. You see, if you break that down to 1 coffee a day (and very few people reuse polystyrene cups, I know, I worked in catering), you basically have to hang onto it for 3 1/2 years and then you’ll be officially benefiting the environment. Well, I’ve had the same coffee mug for 8 years now. I almost never use a different mug when at home. And of course, their number assumes no other practices, such as “navy washing” your dishes. Geez, people must throw out their dishes every couple of years! Yup, surely they do. On the fan, I wouldn’t mind having one for only one reason: so my cats would stop getting their whiskers lopped off when they go up to our regular fans and stare at them and get hypnotized. Our fans have built-in cages around them, but it does not save their whiskers….

8. Kevin Posted: Oct 16th, 2009 at 1:01 am

   8 I didn’t actually take it without a grain of salt. I just found most of it amusing. The point was to challenge whether or not something that’s advertised as environmentally friendly is automatically so. Keep in mind, statistics are the easiest things to lie with, if you know what you’re doing. And you’ll never believe this, but people that own businesses (such as recycling plants) and politicians have been known to lie to get what they want (the horror, the horror). One of the points of the ecoworld article (referenced in the recycling one) points out that one of the resources we expend is energy, such that some materials cost significantly more energy to recycle than finding more or producing more. If we started using significantly more clean and reliable energy(read: nuclear), this wouldn’t be an issue (for the recycling plant at least, no word on transports). If you like we can divide it into three groups, metals, (bio) degradables, non (bio) degradables. Metals is pretty self evident and as far as I know has always been worth recycling due to not having to purify the metal again. Degradables is anything that rots, wood, paper, food if it rots or breaks down real easy it’s this. Most of the advantage of these is that your extracting other resources from the trash disposal, namely methane gas (from the decomp) and fertilizer (the decomp) which can be then sold off for additional uses. Non degradables are the things that don’t break down naturally so they have to be dealt with in a different way, including such materials as plastics, glass, and rubbers. These tend to cost a significant amount of energy to recycle compared to finding more (unlike metals) and don’t produce secondary benefits (like degradables). One of the points made is that a lot of people have the knee jerk reaction that “we’ll consume all of our resources” but it ignores the whole “non biodegradable” thing means that, unless we shoot the stuff into space or the bottom of the ocean, it won’t be consumed. You take a sack of plastic bottles and throw it into a land fill, it will still be there in fifty years waiting to be recycled with fancy fifty years more advanced recycling technology (just cause it’s not profitable doesn’t mean it’s not researching) and transportation systems (WallE anyone?). If it becomes more energy efficient it becomes cheaper to do and it will become economically feasible. Now this really only applies for countries that are A) land or resource poor (say Japan) or B) uses exceedingly clean energy (… Switzerland? I think they use nothing but nuclear and hydroelectric) since they A)don’t have the land/resources for landfills and B) have exceedingly low costs/pollution for the energy required to do it. The USA has neither factor (Hawaii, maybe, since it’s land poor, it’ll depend on the cost of shipping) so it makes sense to make an estimate of energy used and whether or not that’s the best allocation of resources (hint: kill having the government pay for things and see what business stay around). As for deforestation, well, the leading reason for the deforestation is land development for farming. The turning the trees into paper is more of using all of the buffalo. I pointed out to a few friends that one of the reasons farming picked up is that it’s more cost effective than going out and finding/transporting the what ever you’re going to be growing, but if the trees are going to be cut down anyway it becomes cheaper. If you plunk your paper (or logging) mill down and then farm the trees around you, you forgo the cost of extensive transportation while guaranteeing that you’ll have more trees to cut down (assuming you scrape the seeds off, thus saving yourself some additional mass transport cost). Plus you can lease the land to hunters while your trees are growing (I’ve been to a few of these) for additional revenue. The coffee mug scenario looked more like a simplified version of including energy consumed during production and maintenance instead of just doing something that feels good and call it a day, rather than an actual energy cost analysis. Production and maintenance costs are one of the things that prevents lithium ion powered cars from ever really becoming economical since they’re only good for a couple of years and cause horrendous pollution and energy consumption during manufacture.

9. Kevin Posted: Oct 17th, 2009 at 2:46 am

   9 And it doesn’t look like you can make the cool robot voice by speaking through it.

10. Sam Posted: Oct 26th, 2009 at 9:17 am

    10 I was pretty skeptical about Dyson’s products, but having tried a couple of non-dyson ‘cyclone’ (basically ‘air-centrifuge’) vacuums from major brands (I’m looking at you, Electrolux, among others) before I bought my current dyson-branded machine, the knockoffs are nothing compared to the original. I hate buying expensive branded crap, but I love my dyson.