Fancii Small Personal USB Fan review: will this keep you cool at your desk?

The dusty old desktop fan in my office broke recently. Since then, my permanent status has been something like this:

Over the weekend, I invested in a Fancii Small Personal USB Fan. It’s described in its ridiculously elongated Amazon product title as a “Portable Mini Table Desk Fan with Twin Turbo Blades, Whisper Quiet Cyclone Air Circulating Technology – For Home, Office, Outdoor Travel”.

In short, it’s a squat tube, about 10cm in diameter, that claims to sputter out enough airflow to keep you cool as you type. But does it? With the mercury tipping dangerously close to 30C yesterday afternoon, I gave it a thorough test.

Fancii Small Personal USB Fan review: design

It was the compact design and “whisper quiet” promise that drew me to the Fancii fan (it certainly wasn’t the name). My last fan kept me cool, but made a noise like an asthmatic washing machine and had to be kept on the floor as it was too cumbersome and rattly for my desk.

The Fancii fits easily on my cluttered office desk and doesn’t come close to drowning out the office music. It has two speed settings, the slowest of which is definitely audible but not annoyingly so – for you or your office colleagues. The faster speed setting – which I needed in yesterday afternoon’s meltdown – does crank the noise up considerably. If it’s ‘whisper quiet’, it’s Brian Blessed who’s doing the whispering.

The speed is controlled by tapping the top surface of the fan – there’s no button. A 60cm or so USB cable gives you plenty of latitude to position the fan wherever you desire, provided there’s a free USB port on your desktop somewhere (many screens have one hidden around the back). It draws only 2W of power, so it’s not even going to register on your energy bills.

Fancii Small Personal USB Fan review: cooling

So does it have enough grunt to stare down the Great British Heatwave? The fans aren’t super-powerful and I’ve had to place it around 30cm in front of me to feel the benefit. The low-speed setting is sufficient to keep you cool at most times, although I did need the extra blast of speed when things got toasty yesterday afternoon. Still, it was enough to prevent a Blair-like sheen forming on my forehead.

You can adjust the angle of the fan through 180-degrees, allowing you to direct the airflow to where it’s most needed.

Fancii Small Personal USB Fan review: verdict

For £16, the Fancii Small Personal USB Fan is a handy little gadget for those who find themselves sweltering at their desks. It’s obviously no replacement for air conditioning, but it’s enough to make working through our stupendous summer bearable.

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