Heat Fan
A change of pace today as we move indoors next to the wood stove; appropriate on a windy and chilly fall day.
I made this picture of the fan that sits on the wood stove on the first day that we fired up the stove this fall. It was a much extended summer this year and we did not need the supplemental heat until three weeks ago. The last few days have been another story entirely with frost, clear skies and then yesterday a strong, cold wind.
The Ecofan is an ingenious design which runs on a thermoelectric motor that uses only heat from the wood stove to turn the fan and better distribute the warm air of the stove. They are said to improve wood stove efficiency by making the room more evenly heated and certainly we have noticed a big difference since we got this one.
There are two blades to the fan and even with quite long exposures I tended to get a banded shot of the fan blades when they are in motion. So, I took a number of brackets and blended them in photomatix to get this picture which more fully illustrates the blades rotating, but also allows the radiating fins to be visible on the main body of the fan behind the spinning blades. Really long exposures gathered too much light from the shiny fan blades and gave a white blurred circle without any background visible.
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Canon 5Dii, Canon 100mm/f2.8 macro lens, ISO100, f2.8, five brackets, 1/8th second at +/- 1 EV and +/- 2 EV.
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burnt embers 
What a fabulous study, my friend, further proving how you can see things in the world we live that sometimes get missed!! I love the industrial feel to this shot and the mechanical underpinnings. Maybe it’s the car guy in me, but I find this to be quite something else!
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Thanks Toad – nice to mix things up a bit. And this was in a bit of sun or bright light and just asking to be photographed.
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Very cleverly captured. Gives a real sense of the speed of rotation.
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Thank you Andy. It does whip around and move a lot of air. The blades have to be well aligned or it makes noise – when this one came to live with us (it seems to have been a bit neglected in its previous home) I had to spend a bit of time getting the two blades in the same rotation plane, and after that it has been almost silent. It spins faster the hotter it gets. I wonder why they don’t use these things inside computers to keep them cool.
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A clever technique and a very effective image. I’m now off to find out more about Ecofans.
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Hi Patrick – nice to have you visiting! There is a UK distributor that I noticed when finding a link for this post.
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no need to merge sequences here, its self-merging.
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That is true. I thought that if I took longer exposures I would get this kind of effect, but in fact the longer the exposure the more the shiny blades reflected and it becomes a circular blur of light, with nothing showing from behind. Blending some of those with the others brought out this kind of effect very satisfactorily.
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Very clever and innovative shot. I really like this one. We have a gas fireplace that keeps us warm during the winter months and is very efficient heat source.
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Thanks Ken! They make these things for free standing gas stoves as well. They are a bit pricey and for that reason we did not get one. But this one was given to us recently and now I wish we had got one years ago.
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Makes me think of Chaplin’s Modern Times with a bit of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis thrown in.
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Hi Katherine, not for the first time your film literacy makes my film illiteracy stand out like a sore thumb. I just don’t watch movies these days. I have seen Modern Times, but not Metropolis, at least not that I recall. But, I can imagine this then getting all warmed up and then wandering around the room, only stopping when it cooled down too far. Good then they are really heavy.
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I just looked at the trailer for the restored version of Metropole (youtube has everything, doesn’t it?). What an amazing looking movie. My local video store specializes in the obscure (they have to these days) so I expect they have a copy. Maybe I will watch a movie soon!
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It is really wonderful. It is the clock that the main male character has to move manually (He takes over from an oppressed worker) that made me relate it to your photo. And yes, I do love a good movie!
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