Most of the device stories we publish on ExtremeTech are about various IoT devices. We do not tend to cover the more prosaic side of the industry, just because you will be looking for a long time and with difficulty finding a “dumb” appliance manufacturer covering your washer with an interface designed specifically to look like human skin. Take a basic bathroom at Home Depot, and it probably won’t come with an integrated butthole scanner. Shoes that you have to tie may not be very cool, but you also don’t risk locking your shoes.
But – in this case – let’s make an exception.
The 54 inch Hampton Bay indoor / outdoor Mara fan sold through Home Depot and manufactured by King of Fans has been picked up. Due to a manufacturing defect, the fan blades may not remain connected to the fan body during use. According to the company, this may represent “a risk of injury”.
This is a very gentle way of saying “Our ceiling fan can attack you at any time”. One wonders whether the company could have made more money by selling a “54-inch Mara internal / external random attack fan”. A ceiling fan that hurls pieces of itself across the room at random intervals is very 2020.
To address the issue with a slightly more serious appearance, Gizmodo reports that about 88,000 of these fans have been sold in the United States. Not all Mara 54 inch fans are affected. There is a manufacturing defect in some fans that left their blades stuck by just one screw instead of two. The only way to know if you have an affected fan is to examine it manually:
There were 47 reports of detachment of the fan blades, with four reports of material damage and two reports of people actually being hit by the fan blades. While the defect rate appears disappointingly low, the fan appears to hit humans at a satisfactory rate – if, of course, your goal is to create a fan that works as a pet threatening / discrete killing device.
If your goal it is not to develop a murder device, well then, the product recall probably makes sense. The instructions above will show you how to solve the problem, but if you are not comfortable performing the steps or do not have the proper tools, you have the option to contact the company and return the fan.
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