Lasko 16" Electrically Reversible Window Fan with Storm Guard 16900G

I've had two of these fans for 4 years now. One upstairs, one downstairs, both set to exhaust. I'd have more of these if I had another window in the house small enough to accept the fan.Just in case you haven't thought about this subject before, it's a lot easier to suck hot air out of a room with an exhaust fan than it is to push cool air in to the room. Using an exhaust fan works much better than just opening a window wide and hoping cool air will blow in eventually.For summer evenings, as soon as it's cooler outside than inside, exhaust fans are the bomb.Place this fan properly in a window, so that the fan and its casing cover the entire open window area. Then open another nearby window just a few inches, and feel the cool breeeze blowing in. When I have both fans going and the patio sliding door open 6 inches you can feel the breeze 6 feet inside. It takes only about 2 hours from jump to cool my 2500 sq ft house to outside levels with both fans going. I've had to put them on timers to stop at 2am or it gets too cold.So why is this a great exhaust fan?It's not the Rolls Royce of fans. It's a good fan at a great price. You can pay 3x what this one usually costs ($50 to $80) for only marginal improvements in performance. True, it's not built like a Sherman tank but it's built plenty well enough to do its job. (I like that--you know what they say, An engineer is someone who knows how to build a bridge that barely stands, but it does stand.)Some notes:If your window opens side to side, the height of the window on the inside ledge should be at least 26.5 inches and less than 34 inches. You need to be able to open the window at least 18 inches wide, preferably 20. They say this is a 16 inch fan, but that's the blade width. The basket is a little over 18 inches. You can screw the fan into the window, if your wife will let you. For some reason wives seem to object more to screw heads sticking out in the horizontal plane of a window than the vertical. It will work just fine to wedge the fan by turning it 90 degrees and extending the side panels appropriately. The side panels can be precisely set--they have two screws on each side. You may want to put some foam rubber or other soft material along the edge of the panels to reduce vibration--I didn't find it necessary.If your window opens top to bottom, then the width of the inside window ledge should be at least 26.5 inches and less than 34 inches, and you should be able to open the window in such a way that the height of the opening is no more than 21 inches, 22 at the most. You can wedge the fan in this kind of window too, if screws still don't pass the wife test.If you use screws, use the template included with the fan, and try hard to be precise, leaving about 1/16 of an inch of space at the bottom when the fan is set in. The fan has a clever keyhole scheme for hanging it in the window, similar to the keyhole opening you use when hanging a picture on a single nail. Take the keyhole length into account when using the template or be ready to put paper towels or felt/foam rubber under the fan to stop rattle.At highest speed the fan isn't annoying--you can sleep with it in the same room if you're not a person who's bugged by white noise. At low speed, it's very quiet.It moves a lot of air. My biggest challenge is getting my wife to buy into the idea that opening one window 6 inches will cool the room faster than opening it all the way. The idea is to get a breeze sucked into the house, instead of having cool air just mill around at window boundaries.My fans have been going now for 4 years with no signs of quitting. But I did just buy another one as a backup. No reflection on the fan, I'm just one of Those Guys.Be careful with the wings that extend to fit the window. They're not unduly flimsy, but they are a little flimsy. I broke one already. Another commenter worried about getting out of a window in case of a fire if the fans were screwed in. My take is that an adrenaline-charged 6 year old would have no problem flinging this fan across the room when screwed in. If you're worried, wedge.Despite what I've said about noise and vibration, the fan is nicely balanced and not prone to excess vibration. You have to do some work mounting it correctly, but it's simple work for anyone if you relax and do it right. Get a level and a glass of wine, and you'll be fine.You will have to clean your window screens. Kind of like replacing your furnace filters. Depending on how dusty your area is, you may have to do it more than once a year.It is nice to be able to shut the window without moving the fan. Ours stay in the windows year round.Bottom line: if it gets cool enough at night in the summer where you live that you wish you could sleep outside because the house stays hot, this fan is for you, if you have windows that can fit it.

I moved into my apartment in June 2008. It looked like a nice place to live and about six months later, I was wondering if I had made the right decision.First of all, there wasn't much circulation of air in the summer. All the windows were on the West side...one in the bathroom, two in the living room and one in the kitchen/dining area and if the wind was coming from any direction that wasn't West, it could pretty steamy in the place.Looking on the bright side though, I knew that Winter would be here in a few months and then things would be different. Oh boy, as it turned out, the *things would be different* comment was a vast under-statement.Back to Summer...and the fact that I hated all the heat in my apartment.I thought that maybe I should get a window fan or two to get some of that air moving. That's when I stumbled onto this 16" fan from Lasko. I did as much research as I could and finally decided to make the purchase. As it turned out, it was one of my better decisions!When the fan got here, I took it out of the box and read the owners manual from front to back. Then, I looked at the window and then back at the fan and wondered if it was going to fit. It looked BIG! And the window looked, well...NOT big. So I opened the window as far as it would go and simply popped the unit right in except for a half inch gap on the top. So I carefully pulled the window down until there was sort of a nice snug fit.However, there was a large gap on the right side, even after I pulled out the extension on the unit. But heck, being wildly resourceful, I just found some durable cardboard and after measuring the window and cutting the cardboard to size, I just snapped it in and had a perfect fit! Cool!But, as I checked out my work, I saw a lot more small gaps and that just wasn't acceptable cuz I needed kind of a vacum around the fan unit to be able to draw the air from the bathroom window, all the way through the apartment to the fan in the dining area.As luck would have it, I found a gob of Homer Hankies from when the Minnesota Twins won the World Series and I wondered if it would be sacrilegious if I would use them to fill in the final gaps around the fan unit. Well no it wouldn't, I convinced myself and besides...Who's gonna know? I'm certainly not going to go blabbing about it down at the local watering hole. So...that was that!By now, I was sweating profusely so I figured it was time to cool off a little and as long as there was this half a whole house fan just sitting there in the window...why not give it a try? Eh? So I set the fan on Low and hit the switch and GEEEZ!...the effect was almost, immediate! There was a lot of air coming from the bathroom and I cooled down right now. And I was happy, again.Then, Winter showed up and I thought I would have to remove the fan and store it till next Summer. But, then the so called free heat from the steam radiators came on and as long as it was waaay late Fall and about three degrees above zero, it was kind of comfortable in here, even though the exhaust fan was still running. Then, wouldn't you know it? A few days later the outside temp went up to sixty degrees and I figured it was time to shut off the heater valves.Well, because this building is almost one hundred years old, I think the heater valves are the originals that came with the radiators and when I tried to shut them off, I discovered that they were already off and when the temp in my apartment got up to 92 degrees, I turned the exhaust fan up to medium in self defense.All that stuff was...back in the bad old days and that poor fan has run non-stop for almost six years, until a few months ago when it started to groan a little and I started to panic. So, I went to Amazon and found the exact fan and ordered it...again! then I removed a few phillps screws from the frame part, unplugged the old fan and pulled it out. Then I put the new fan in and put in the screws and plugged it in.Awesome!! Now I should be in good shape for another five or six years. What a great gadget, this fan is. That fan bearing is incredibly durable. So, if you need a fan that will do the job for you, think about all this drivel I just wrote and go get one! :)

5 years and it's still going strong, I run it almost daily for hours at a time during the spring and fall. I love this fan.