NSA Rechargeable Column Fan review: A fan you can take anywhere

NSA’s Rechargeable Column Fan isn’t cheap, but it’s also unlike most other fans because you can use it cordlessly for up to eight hours at a time. Indeed, thanks to its rechargeable battery, the fan can easily be moved to wherever you need to use it without messing about with wires.

If that’s important for you, then the NSA Rechargeable Column Fan is well worth your consideration, with plenty of features, low noise levels and solid performance among its other key attributes.

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NSA Rechargeable Column Fan review: What do you get for the money?

I should mention that the rechargeable battery is fully hidden away within the fan, so there’s nothing to assemble – charging the fan is as simple as plugging it in. You can use it while it’s charging and a status light tells you when the battery is full.

It’s a fairly sizeable, albeit inoffensive-looking unit, standing 1.1m tall and just over 320mm wide and deep at the base. To make moving the fan easier (it weighs a rather hefty 6kg) there’s a small carry handle on its reverse and, so you don’t need to get up every time you want to change the settings, there’s also a remote control provided in the box.

Whether you prefer this or the control panel on top of the fan, the current mode and speed are always displayed on a small display at the top of the fan. This and the status light can both be disabled at night by long-pressing the power button for five seconds.

NSA Rechargeable Column Fan review: What features and settings does it have?

The NSA Rechargeable Column Fan offers an impressive selection of speeds, modes and other functions. Along with the regular mode, which has 24 speed settings, you’ll find a Nature mode, which delivers breezes of random, varying strengths; Sleep mode, which blows air in bursts of quickly increasing and then decreasing strength; and finally Auto mode, which increases or decreases fan speed according to how warm the room is.

If that all sounds rather confusing, to simplify things a little NSA only lets you choose from five wider speed settings when using any of these modes. This helps you to more broadly set the power of the fan when it’s going to be working at variable speed.

Unlike the NSA Ultimate Column Fan, which has a range of oscillation settings, however, the Rechargeable Column Fan oscillates through just 90 degrees. It’s possible to enable this in all of the above modes, and you can also use the Timer and Preset modes in conjunction with any of these. The former turns the fan off after a set time, while the Preset mode delays its start time by between half an hour and fifteen hours. Still with me?

The final standout feature is that the NSA Rechargeable Column Fan comes with an aroma tray. This lets you use a few drops of essential oil on an absorbent cotton pad to spread an aroma of your choice around the room as you cool it. That’s a nice touch if you’re not keen on nasty, synthetic air fresheners.

NSA Rechargeable Column Fan review: How well does it perform?

The NSA Rechargeable Column Fan is a bit of a mixed bag as far as performance is concerned. An anemometer gave a reading of 2.0m/sec when positioned dead centre and one metre away from the fan aperture, which is decent but considerably less powerful than the brand’s Ultimate Column Fan which gave a reading of 3.5m/sec.

That’s perhaps unsurprising given its stablemate is designed to only ever be used on mains power. However, the good news is that there was no drop off when using the Rechargeable Column Fan on battery rather than mains power. It’s worth noting that NSA only promises up to two hours of usage on high power from a single charge, though, and this may decrease further when using the oscillation mode. On medium speeds, this increases to five hours, and you can get a full eight hours when using it on lower settings.

As for noise, the Rechargeable Column Fan fared relatively well. From a distance of one metre at full power, it gave an average reading of 57dB(A), which is just a touch louder than the Ultimate Colum Fan at 55dB(A). At lower speeds, this drops significantly. Indeed, at level 5, which still delivers a good breeze, the fan makes just 43dB(A) of noise, which is very tolerable when sleeping.

NSA Rechargeable Column Fan review: Is there anything we didn’t like?

The only caveat to this is that at the lowest speeds, I became more aware of the noise of the fan spinning, as opposed to the white noise of it moving air around. It’s a minor quibble, but something that’s worth pointing out nonetheless.

On another note, I also didn’t get on particularly well with the Sleep mode. Instead, I preferred to use the fan on a low constant setting at night rather than have it deliver bursts of air. That’s probably something you can put down to personal preference, but worth bearing in mind if you’ve been toying with a new fan that offers a dedicated “sleep” mode.

The only other small thing to flag is that, when used on battery power, the Rechargeable Column Fan doesn’t support all of its usual features. You can’t turn it on with the remote (it’ll still let you turn it off) and nor does it let you use the Preset function.

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NSA Rechargeable Column Fan: Should buy it?

If cordless use is a priority for you, absolutely. The NSA Rechargeable Column Fan offers a combination of performance and features you’ll struggle to find elsewhere, and in a package that looks good and is easy to use.

If you have no intention of using it without the cord plugged in, however, you can save yourself a full £60 by buying the model that doesn’t have this function. £120 feels much more palatable if, like me, you have no problem with plugging the fan in each time.

Alternatively, if you want more power and a built-in Ioniser, the NSA Ultimate Rechargeable Column Fan delivers in spades for just £150.