13 best fans for keeping cool, tried and tested in the heat

The Vortex’s Air model is hard to beat, which is why it’s the best fan. Functioning as a heater, air purifier and (virtually silent) fan, this multi-tasking appliance is great value for money, considering it can be used year-round. Looks-wise, it’s remarkably similar to the Dyson purifier hot+cool formaldehyde (featured below), but the Vortex Air model is more than £400 cheaper. It even has the same grade HEPA-13 filter as the Dyson.

The streamlined design means it fits seamlessly into a room. Although we tested the white and silver design, it is available in eight colours to further complement your decor.

We appreciated the remote control timer, so you can adjust the settings from wherever you are in the room without having to get up and push any buttons. We found this to be particularly beneficial at nighttime when we were just dozing off, but needed the fan on us until we were fully asleep. The smart thermostat feature on the Vortex fan was also impressive and meant we could choose a temperature and have the fan switch off automatically when it had cooled the room to that level, helping to conserve energy.

The highest setting on the Vortex Air is so strong that we felt a significant drop in temperature within just two minutes after turning it on. Bladeless fans like this can often draw air in and circulate it much faster than a traditional fan, cooling a space quickly, and this model is no exception.

Having had this model for more than a year, we’ve also been able to test it during colder conditions and have found the heating functionality to work impressively fast.

If you are on a budget, VonHaus’s tower fan offers excellent value for money. It offers features you find in fans at more than six times the price, such as 70-degree oscillation and an aroma tray. The latter was our favourite feature, as it hugely enhanced the cooling experience. When the air was hot and stuffy, adding some eucalyptus or peppermint oil to the tray made it a lot easier to relax, blowing a fresh scent around the room.

While tower fans are best at cooling large spaces, their looming height means they can stand out like a sore thumb in most homes, but this fan is the ideal solution. At only 31in high, the fan’s sleek, space-saving profile didn’t dominate our living space, yet still provided powerful air circulation. Its controls are conveniently positioned at a user-friendly height, making it easy to adjust between low and high fan speeds, too. We also liked the fact that it has a long cord, so we could place this model wherever we wanted in a room without having to worry about being close to a power socket.

At this price, there’s no app connectivity or voice control, but it does have a timer, so it can be set to turn off at 30-minute intervals for up to 120 minutes. It’s a little analogue, but we found that this two-hour timer came in handy at night, as we could set the fan to cool our bedroom for just long enough for us to get into a deep sleep.

This Levoit tower fan rapidly cools a room. On one occasion during testing, we got home after being out all day and returned to a sauna, and this took just a few minutes to provide instant relief. This is due to an impressive fan speed of 25ft per second.

Despite being one of the most powerful fans we tested, at 28dB, it was also one of the quietest. We had to concentrate to hear it. However, the most impressive thing about this Levoit tower fan is that it has an intelligent temperature sensor. It tracks the room temperature in your home and responds accordingly by changing the fan speed.

We’d recommend this one to busy people who don’t want to add “change the fan speed” to their to-do list. Should you want to take back control, though, it’s relatively easy to switch to manual mode by pressing a button on the main unit, but we enjoyed letting it do its thing in the corner.

Weighing just 900g, JML my foldaway fan is perfect for taking on the move. At its full size, it’s over a metre tall; at its smallest, it’s no bigger than a compact portable speaker. Charge it with the included USB cable, and you’ll get up to 10 hours of power. You can use it outside at a picnic or party as well as inside your home. It would also fare well on camping trips, making sure a tent or caravan felt well ventilated, with no need for a plug socket. The only place we might not put it would be a child’s bedroom, as the base seems less sturdy than some of the other fans we tested.

Despite its diminutive size, this foldaway fan is surprisingly powerful. Position it a few metres from the bed or sofa, and you’ll still feel a breeze. For this reason, we’d recommend operating it on the lowest of the three settings if you’re planning to use it as a desk fan. Thankfully, the motor is very quiet, so it won’t distract you from your work or interfere with sleep.

If you can’t decide if you want a desk fan to cool you as you work or a floor fan to bring down the temperature of the whole room, this convertible model by Shark is the one to pick. It can be used in 12 different ways, from corded to cordless, and can even be used outdoors. It can be placed on the floor to cool you when you’re having a picnic or extended to act as a pedestal fan when you’re sitting at the table or lounging on a deck chair. If you want to feel like you’re sitting by a pool even when you’re just on your balcony, this has a misting attachment that can be connected to a hose pipe to spray you with a light mist of cool water as well as a gentle breeze.

The battery life is excellent, offering 24 hours of cooling power on a full charge, so you can use this for a full day of sitting outdoors in the garden to get your vitamin D fix without breaking a sweat. With five cooling settings and 180-degree oscillation, it does a great job of cooling the air to each side of the unit as well as directly in front of it.

Weighing 5.6kg, it’s a sturdy, durable piece of kit that won’t fall over if you accidentally knock it. However, the downside to this is that you will need two hands when you want to move it from place to place.

When you’re dreaming of air conditioning, yet conscious of the energy consumption, MeacoFan’s air circulator is an impressive alternative. The brand claims that its unique rotation “bounces” air off the walls and ceilings to keep the entire room (and everyone in it) cool. While we were sceptical as to how well this would work, it really does. Not only is it strangely compelling to watch, but it’s also staggeringly effective, transforming even the stuffiest room in our house in a matter of minutes. Miraculously, our space even stayed cool once we’d turned the fan down.

That’s not all. Although the maximum noise level is stated as 60dB, we thought it seemed a lot quieter, thanks to the brushless DC motor, and it’s cheap to run.

The fan also has an eco mode to adjust the speed as the temperature changes, a sleep timer and even a nightlight, which would be handy if used in a child’s room.

While it’s a great desk fan, it’s certainly on the chunky side. It might not work if your WFH setup is a tiny desk in a spare room. However, it works so well that it could be worth making a little space.

If you’re looking for a quiet fan, we’d recommend Duux’s whisper flex smart fan. It operates at just 13dB even on the highest setting. While it’s the priciest pedestal fan we’ve tested, it offers 26 different speed settings, so you can precisely control temperature levels in a room. We were really impressed by the natural breeze mode that simulated real wind. We thought it would be a gimmick, but it was noticeably different from the usual blasting air you find in most fans.

This was also the only pedestal fan we tested that oscillated upward as well as left and right, and it was the only one that came with a free app. This enabled us to control our fan from any room of the house.

The fan has 15m of wind reach, so it can cool a large kitchen just as well as a small bedroom. In night mode, the LED temperature display dims, and it can be set to run for between one to 12 hours before switching off automatically. The height is adjustable, so you can use it as a desktop fan as well as a floor fan.

If you want to recreate the feeling of office air conditioning when you’re working from home in a heatwave, the Beurer’s LV50 fan cools and humidifies the air at the same time. The warm air is drawn into the fan, passes through the cooling evaporation filter and is blown back out as cool air.

Supplied with a USB cable, it’s easy to charge the fan using your PC or laptop while you work, so you don’t have to worry about running out of battery. On a full charge, the battery lasts for four hours, so we also tested it on the bedside table overnight and found the humidifier function especially refreshing. For a very compact unit, this had everything we needed to keep cool at a very reasonable price.

However, it’s best as a desk fan. This won’t cool a whole room, but it will provide relief when working through a heatwave.

With an eight-hour timer that can be adjusted by one-hour increments, Black + Decker’s digital tower fan is perfect for bedrooms. Set it to operate for a couple of hours, which is long enough to help you reach a deep level of sleep, then it will turn off automatically, so you don’t over cool the room. It also helps keep electricity bills low, as you’re not using the fan the entire night.

There’s a remote control, which you can keep next to the bed, so you can adjust the settings while lying down and conserving energy. Even on the highest setting, it emits barely a murmur, so we had no trouble drifting off with this fan in the bedroom.

Able to oscillate 90 degrees, this fan is brilliant at moving cold air around a room. This makes a room feel less stuffy and humid. Even better, you can easily move it between rooms, thanks to an integrated carry handle. When you’re done sleeping, carry it into the kitchen for breakfast and then leave it in your home office to create a productive working environment. At 4kg, you can lift it with one hand, and it doesn’t feel too bulky in a room.

The only drawback is that this isn’t a particularly stylish fan. The black plastic will stand out like a sore thumb in most homes.

Babies, toddlers, and a heatwave are a terrible combination. However, there are occasions when you need to get out of the house for everyone’s sanity. Enter this genius portable fan, which could help prevent some major meltdowns. Simply wrap the stretchy legs around the safety bar on a buggy, pram or car seat, and your kid will be cooled by a fresh breeze near their face. An added bonus is that parents can lean over and benefit from the cooling sensation whenever they need it.

For less than £20, there’s a huge amount of useful features. One is that it rotates 360 degrees to provide airflow from different directions. Another is that the flexible ‘octopus’ legs can be wound around a bar multiple times, so your baby can’t pick it up mid-ride. Don’t worry, there’s also a lot of thick plastic on the outside, so your baby will never be able to touch the blades and incur an injury. As we all know, nap time is important, the fan operates at less than 57dB, so it won’t disturb little ones while they drift off.

The only drawback is that you need to keep this charged up, so it’s not the most eco-friendly fan.

This is one of the lowest-priced smart fans we’ve seen. While you can control the settings via the buttons on the top of the unit, we really enjoyed being able to use the app or our voice to operate this fan. Setup took a while, but it was worth powering through for the convenience it gave us afterwards, as we could adjust the settings without having to move from the sofa. Although the smart controls are fairly basic compared with the priciest fans, they still worked well with both Amazon Alexa and Siri.

With a 50W motor, this tower fan delivered strong airflow while staying impressively quiet – we couldn’t hear it at all in sleep mode, in which it operates at just 15dB. There are two other modes to choose from (normal and natural), too, making it easy to get our room to the perfect temperature. Simply set the timer between one and eight hours, then forget about it.

Other handy functions include a timer, personalised programs and three wind speeds, including normal, natural or sleep. The highest setting seemed a little noisy when we used it while watching TV, but lower settings were barely noticeable, so we had no trouble sleeping with this fan purring away in the corner.

This fan is almost absurd. The Dyson purifier hot+cool formaldehyde doesn’t just cool but will also heat a room and eliminate pollutants, including pollen, dust and formaldehyde. The latter is a colourless gas used in building materials and household products, such as paint and furniture, and Dyson claims that this purifier detects molecules 500 times smaller than 0.1 microns. Although this is a nice-to-have bonus, it’s likely not what will convince you to part with a considerable chunk of cash to have this in your home.

Luckily, it’s a sleek machine all around, with a super-effective heater and excellent air purifier, which ramped up whenever it detected pollutants in our home. We especially loved the fact that we could see how clean the air was on the LED screen on the front.

Cooling is also excellent, especially as the fan oscillates 350 degrees, so it works wherever you are in the room. It also works with voice services and an easy-to-use app and has a night mode, so we had no trouble sleeping when it was on.

However, as with most Dyson products, this is incredibly expensive. If you have the budget, this could be a great choice. It does things that other fans can’t even attempt. However, most of us can’t drop £600 on a fan - especially in Britain, when you’ll probably only need it a couple of weeks a year. No other fan in this round-up has quite the year-round bang for its buck, but you’ll need to be sure you’ll use all its features before blowing the budget on it.

Working from home has its benefits, but leaving the office air conditioning behind on a hot day is not one of them. If you just can’t avoid spending hours stuck at a computer, a desk fan is a no-brainer buy for the summer months to make life a little more bearable. As you’ll be sitting close to the fan itself, there’s no need to spend extra on fancy features, smart controls or even a huge amount of power.

This model has everything required to keep you cool, for a brilliant price. It’s easy to use and assemble with just two speeds, and it won’t even take up much room, as it’s much smaller than a traditional desk fan.

While it can stand on a solid base, we especially loved the fact that it can clip onto the side of a desk to use even less space. However, as an affordable desk fan, it’s missing most of the fancy oscillations and apps you’ll find in the more expensive fans we tested.