Do you find it overly complicated to accurately point a floor fan at yourself from across the room? As with all problems, this can be solved with LASERS.

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Background:

When air conditioning is not available, fans (Figure 1) are the next best thing.

Fig. 1: The humble desk fan / floor fan. It blows air on you. Deluxe!

The Issue:

For a fan that is intended to cool off exactly one person (e.g. while they work at a desk, or sleep in a bed), it can be time-consuming to set up a fan and accurately aim it across the room (Figure 2). It’s easy to point the fan in a general direction, but most small fans have a surprisingly small “sweet spot” of maximum airflow.

Obviously this is easily solved by making this a two-person job, where one person is the fan positioner and the other is the fan target evaluator, but surely there must be a good way for a lone individual to accurately aim a fan.

Fig. 2: This fan is just a few degrees off-target (shown as angle “A”, in blue). Now the person on the right is going to have to walk back over to the fan, adjust it, and return to their original position to see if the new angle is close enough.

Proposal:

The solution is simple: just put a laser pointer on the fan (Figure 3)! Then, whenever aiming is desired, just turn on the laser pointer, aim it at the exact location where airflow is desired, and turn on the fan.

Fig. 3: The “laser fan” is surprisingly not a product that can be purchased as-is, but it’s easy to D.I.Y. one by attaching a laser pointer with painter’s tape.

Alternative laser-free implementation:

It would also be possible to put some kind of targeting scope directly on the fan. (And by “targeting scope,” we mean a paper towel roll.) This would require the fan-adjuster to hunch over in an awkward position to look through the “scope,” but it would definitely be cheaper.

PROS: Makes life slightly easier for the intersection of individuals who 1) use fans, 2) don’t have any other people around, and 3) aren’t willing to compromise on getting the absolutely 100% most-accurate fan positioning.

CONS: The actual market size of the intersected groups above may be too small to support a commercial product.