Gadget Bits: Everything Is Smart Now, Including Your Pedestal Fan

We live in an age where there’s a “smart” version of nearly every household device. Sometimes it feels like we’re in a race to see how many devices we can have on our home network and controllable by voice or app. Some of them can seem a little silly (I’m not sure I need to be able voice control my toaster), but when the folks at Nash offered me one of their smart fans, I had to check it out, since this seems like a really useful idea.

The Nash CoolSmart Fan is a pretty standard 16″ oscillating pedestal fan, like you either already own, have owned at some point in your life, or could go purchase at Target on any day of the week. There’s not much about the construction of the fan itself to differentiate it, although the fact that the base is a heavy disk (perhaps cast iron?) rather than just two crossed bars, makes it feel sturdier and less likely to get casually knocked over.

Where the CoolSmart brings something new to the job is its brain and connectivity. When connected to your home network via Wi-fi, you can control it with the available app, and add it to your Alexa or Google home systems. With that done, your fan can be controlled via voice. You can turn it on or off, or change the speed or oscillation functions with just a couple words. Even better, via the app, there are all kinds of automation and scheduling functions available. You can even automate the fan based on the weather.

We’ve had the CoolSmart fan in our bedroom for a couple weeks now, and it’s been great. We don’t have air conditioning, and at the peak of summer, there’s always a few days (and nights) when things are just a bit warmer than we’d like. So we’ll often end up running a fan a night. The CoolSmart runs very quietly, and because it’s easy to set a timer for it to turn off, there’s no worry about leaving it running all night long. Of course, we can always just tell it to turn off if we forget in the middle of the night without having to get out of bed.

Bottom line: the CoolSmart fan is actually a useful connected device that can improve your quality of life and adds convenient features to a device many of us use every day. You can find them at Amazon for $99 (but there’s a $5 off instant coupon).