VonHaus 2500952 6in desk fan review: Cheap and cheerful personal cooling

Get over its tiny size and pocket money pricing, and VonHaus’s 2500952 6in desk fan is a surprisingly useful gizmo. It’s a compact cordless fan that can sit on your desk or bedside table to help you stay cool, running on a pair of 18650 rechargeable lithium ion batteries for up to ten hours. What’s more, it has a built-in LED lamp, which might be handy if you’re outside chilling out after dark on a hot day, not to mention if you’re camping.

VonHaus 2500952 6in desk fan review: What do you get for the money? 

The VonHaus 2500952 is a 6in desk fan that resembles a miniature pedestal fan and is cheap as chips when it’s on sale, at just £15. The 2500952 is on sale regularly, so despite the £30 RRP, you’ll rarely ever have to pay it.

It stands at 267mm, or roughly 10.5in, tall on a base that’s 133mm in diameter, though the fan and protective grill are larger, measuring 166mm across. The plastics feel cheap and there’s a little flex in the light grey front cover, but this comes with an upside: at just 0.44kg with the batteries installed, this fan is about as light and portable as desk fans get.

Surprisingly, it’s also adjustable. The fan can tilt 5-degrees downwards and another 40-degrees upwards, while a little dial on the rear either locks it in place or allows it to oscillate through 30-degrees horizontally.

VonHaus 2500952 6in desk fan review: What features and settings does it have?

Five tiny LED indicators tell you the current speed and whether the fan is charging, while the big fan button at the front toggles through standby and the three available speeds. The smaller light button turns on a narrow column of three bright LEDs, with two brightness levels.

The two 18650 batteries slot into a compartment at the bottom, and are charged through a USB Type-C connection. Don’t expect fast charging, though; it only operates at the most basic 5V/1A speeds, with the batteries taking just over six hours to recharge. 

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VonHaus 2500952 6in desk fan review: How well does it perform? 

Needless to say, this little wonder doesn’t have the puff of a full-sized desk fan. I measured the maximum airflow at a distance of 1m at 2m/sec, which isn’t going to give the Duux Globe (2.7m/sec) or NSA UK Compact Cool (2.9m/sec) much to worry about. However, at close range, where you’re likely to use the fan, the output is perfectly acceptable – if not a little too fierce. At 60cm, I measured the maximum air speed at 2.7m/sec, dropping to 2m/sec at medium speed and 1.6m/sec on low. In everyday use on a warm day, I was happy to keep it on low.

That wasn’t just for comfort, but because on higher speeds it gets surprisingly noisy. I measured the sound output at full blast at 42.5dBA and at medium at 34.8dBA – both from a distance of 1m. Only on low, which brings it down to 29.5dBA, did I find the noise less distracting, and it’s not helped that you get the odd mechanical note creeping in while it’s working.

The built-in lamp goes fairly bright at its higher setting, but has the odd blue colour temperature you see with a lot of cheap LED lamps or camping lights, and is also very directional. I’d use it to get some light for visibility in the middle of the night, but I wouldn’t want to try and read or play cards with it.

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VonHaus 2500952 6in desk fan review: Is there anything we didn’t like? 

I found the little dial that turns oscillation on or off wasn’t always reliable, and didn’t always lock the fan in place until I gave it a second twist. I would also have liked some more info on the state of the battery. You have no idea how charged it is until it finishes charging, or how much charge it has left while it’s on. In tests, I found it ran for 9hrs 23mins on the medium setting before conking out. Unless you’re a really heavy user, you shouldn’t need to charge it more than once per day.

VonHaus 2500952 6in desk fan review: Should you buy it? 

There’s a little of ‘you get what you pay for’ here, but I like this little 6in fan. It’s easy to use, very portable and very useful for some personal cooling – and that low, low pricing doesn’t harm its chances either. 

If you’re looking for a fan to keep you cool all summer long, then I’d suggest something larger, more robust and preferably mains-powered, but if you want some help keeping cool, wherever you are, the VonHaus 2500952 is hard to resist.