Tower fans are a pretty good alternative over traditional standing fans as they are slimmer and take up less space. They may not have as large of cooling radius, but they circulate cool air well. The Levoit Tower Fan in its 42-inch variant is a good option to consider, retailing at S$169.
Design and build quality
Levoit stuck a with simple black and white design for their Tower Fan (42-inch). You get a black front and a white back in a cylindrical fashion. The base is black in colour, so from the front it looks you the fan is completely housed in black. The design is average, nothing really special to call out.
Build quality of the Levoit Tower Fan is decent. The plastic used doesn’t feel too thick or high quality, but it works well at holding the fan standing up straight. There is cutout at the back of the fan to act as a handle to carry around the fan. This “handle” double up as a storage for the remote control.
There is a LED display panel at the front of the Levoit Tower Fan that is useful for seeing the current fan speed, the fan mode, and other useful information. On the top, you have six touch-based buttons which control the following:
- On/off button
- Fan mode button
- Timer button
- Advanced Sleep button
- Oscillate button
- Fan speed button
Instead of touching the buttons at the top, Levoit also supplied a remote control with slightly more buttons for more convenient adjustments on the fly. The top of the remote has a glossy black finish, while the back has a matte finish and curved for easier grip. It would have been nicer to have a matte front as it doesn’t pick up fingerprints that easily.
Again, the plastic used isn’t too high quality, especially the matte surface on the back being prone to scratches. The plastic used on battery compartment is soft, so take special care when opening it as I have already chipped off small parts of plastic with a coin.
There are two plastic tabs on the back of the Levoit Tower Fan to store the remote control, but it can be a tight squeeze trying to slot it there. It is a thoughtful design element but needs slightly better implementation.
Features
There is a light blue plastic angle adjuster which you can move it up/down to adjust the direction of wind. Levoit mentions that the angle of adjustments is around 30º up/down, but I didn’t feel observable change in the way I received the breeze so don’t expect anything substantial.
Specs wise, the Levoit Tower Fan has a maximum fan speed of 25ft/s (7.6m/s) and air volume of 1,252 CFM – adjustable via 12 fan speeds. Oscillation is also available at a span of 90º. There is a built-in thermostat in the Levoit Tower Fan, which is able to monitor the temperature of your surroundings. You will only be able to see the temperature in certain fan modes.
Levoit Tower Fan has four fans modes which you can choose to use based on your habits:
- Normal Mode
- Turbo Mode
- Auto Mode
- Advanced Sleep Mode
Normal Mode
This is the most basic mode, where you can set the fan speed and choose if you want the fan to oscillate. Unfortunately, as the Levoit Tower Fan not a smart device, there is no way to limit the range of the oscillation. It will always oscillate at span of 90º.
Turbo Mode
Turbo Modes cranks up the Levoit Tower Fan to its maximum speed of 12, and the fan will start to oscillate. This mode is useful to combo with the air-conditioner at home if you want to quickly circulate cold air in your house – great to use when you have guests over. You can manually stop the oscillation if you wish.
There is some “smartness” to this mode as the Levoit Tower Fan will start to decrease the fan speed to 6 once it has sensed that the room temperature drops by 3ºC.
Auto Mode
Auto Mode as it name suggests, automatically adjusts/sets the fan speed based on the room temperature. You can refer to the below table on the corresponding fan speeds:
| Room temperature | Fan speed |
|---|---|
| ≤21ºC | 1 |
| 22ºC | 2 |
| 23ºC | 3 |
| 24ºC | 4 |
| 25ºC | 5 |
| 26ºC | 6 |
| 27ºC | 7 |
| 28ºC | 8 |
| 29ºC | 9 |
| 30ºC | 10 |
| 31ºC | 11 |
| ≥31ºC | 12 |
But this table isn’t hard and fast. You can adjust the base fan speed when the fan turns on, and once room temperature is lowered by 1ºC, it will follow the existing logic of reducing fan speed by 1.
Advanced Sleep Mode
Advanced Sleep Mode is useful if you like to have fan breeze as you sleep. When triggered, all sounds and the display lights will turn off after 5 seconds. The starting fan speed will be used as the benchmark. After 1 hour, the fan speed will decrease as the room temperature stabilises. Afterwards, the fan speed will adjust according to the room temperature – similar to Auto Mode.
Timer
Alternatively, you can opt for the good ol’ timer setting whereby the Levoit Tower Fan will power down after your customised timer which can be adjusted in 1-hour increments.
Maintenance
To clean the fan, simply pop off the back cover of the Levoit Tower Fan and use a vacuum or duster to clean the inside of the power fan. Levoit says that you an also wash/rinse with water as well.
User experience
The breeze coming from the Levoit Tower Fan is actually quite strong at its max speed of 12, and has a good spread that can cool 2 people. Oscillation definitely helps with distributing the air well when there is a group of people. It would have been nice to be able to the degree coverage of the oscillation as 90º can be quite wide if it is for a single person use.
When it comes to noise levels, I found the Levoit Tower Fan relatively quiet. Around speed 9 and above you’ll start noticing the fan sounds. Power consumption is pretty conservative at 23W.
Conclusion
At S$169, the Levoit Tower Fan is a little pricier than other similar tower fans from Mistral or Sona to name a few but it does have a pretty wide oscillation angle while being relatively quiet at the same time. It’s pretty versatile – distributing the cool air from my aircon in my living room, and keeping my cool in the afternoon in my study room.