The Kitchen Fan

I never knew a broken kitchen fan could become so fun.

It was not the first time. Actually, this was the second time in my life I was faced with the dreadful prospect of fixing a kitchen fan.

But the first time, I took the easy route.

You know, Google the damn fan model and buy an incredibly expensive motor replacement.

I mean, what are my options?

Try to fix it myself? Where do you start?

Time is money. If it took me only 2 hours to fix, providing my hourly rate is $50, that would be $100.

The replacement is strategically priced at just less than $100, so the only sensible option is just to buy it.

But this time was different…

Actually, this whole year has been a bit different.

You may have noticed I have been writing much less frequently.

As I cross my mid-life point, I’ve become a bit more aware of the fleeting nature of this thing we call life.

Aptly called “midlife crisis.” I even made a whole video about it.

One of the realizations from crossing this milestone in life was that I discovered that being overly practical or efficient seems to be a bit at odds with enjoying life.

You see, I’ve spent the vast majority of the last decade staring at a computer screen, trying to make money online in the most efficient manner.

I’ve accomplished it. Most days, I’m making money without lifting a finger. This is great, but in pursuing financial freedom via passive income, I feel I’ve neglected something very important – living life.

If your goal is to make the most amount of money with the least amount of work, then being efficient in everything you do in life is a paramount principle.

This means, you stop looking at hours in terms of time, but in terms of money. When you do that, all your decisions are based on ROI (Return Of Investment) or Opportunity-Cost.

When you’re running a company, which by definition only can survive if you focus on profit, it makes sense to be led by an ROI principle.

The problem arises when that same principle is applied to your own life.

I’ve found out that the more you live an ROI-based life, the richer you become financially, but the poorer you become in the intangibles that make a life well-lived.

The intangibles cannot be measured, not in dollars, pounds, or seconds. But, for the entrepreneurially-minded, not being able to measure things can be frustrating. After all, to grow a business, one needs to know very well their numbers and how certain actions contribute to the damned bottom line.

After many years running my own business, I’ve become really good at measuring and tracking visits, clicks, and conversion rates.

That has helped optimize my business but not my lifeness.

The kitchen fan is just but one of the many decisions I’ve consciously made this year to maximize living at the expense of hurting my business.

Of course, a balance between working and living can be achieved. This year I simply decided to skew the balance towards the living part.

Why? Because I know I won’t regret it. Because I (we all) need to do sometimes.

As you may have guessed… I didn’t buy a new kitchen fan from Amazon.

This time I decided to do it the hard way, the inefficient way. It turned out to be a much more expensive decision financially, but alas, much more rewarding.

My goal was to use this as a learning opportunity. I wanted to learn how something as mundane as a kitchen fan worked. I wanted to know why kitchen fans fail. I wanted to know what it would take to repair it.

So I grabbed my toolbox and started to get my hands dirty (or, in this case, greasy!).

The easy solution would’ve been Googling “How to fix an old kitchen fan.” But I was not looking for easy; I was looking for rewarding even it would mean more difficulty.

I called my dad. My dad is a mindbogglingly talented retired electrical engineer.

Via Skype video, we both spent close to 1 hour just trying to find the culprit responsible for my stupid kitchen fan not turning on.

Was it not getting electricity?

Let’s get the voltmeter and measure if current was going to it. That meant about 8 trips downstairs to figure out which panel breaker was connected to the fan.

It was getting current. So, was it the on/off potentiometer?

Hmm.. that was working too.

Ok. Let’s take the motor and apply current directly to it.

That meant sacrificing a power cord so I could expose the copper leads so I could try to resurrect the fan.

No luck. That meant the actual motor was broken!

Patiently guided by my dad, I grabbed a cutter and literally started doing surgery into the kitchen fan motor to expose its innards.

It turns out most electrical motors are pretty simple in design. You have a copper coil wound a thousand times around a piece of iron. When current flows through a coil, that creates a magnetic field which makes a thing called rotor… rotate.

There is really not much that can break inside those motors.

Except for one thing… kitchen fan motors have a little fuse to protect the motor from overheating.

This little fuse is hidden under a piece of insulating material just over the coil.

Check it out…

To see if the fuse had tripped, my dad asked me to bypass the fuse and apply current directly to the motor.

And the motor worked fine!!

But why did the fuse trip?

The fuse is rated up to 150 Celsius; this meant that the motor had overheated and the fuse had done its job.

But what caused the motor to overheat?

Friction. My dad noticed that when I made the fan spin manually, it stopped really quickly where it should have kept rotating freely a bit longer.

Over years of use, grease builds up in the motor and can get inside the motor bushings making it hard to spin.

When the motor has trouble spinning, it starts getting hotter. Eventually, the motor will overheat and could catch on fire. Except it doesn’t because of the little $2 thermal fuse inside it.

I came to the realization that probably millions of kitchen fans are failing every year and thrown into the dumpster because of a $2 fuse.

As my dad pointed out, this is the result of the consumerist society we’ve created. It’s much easier to replace things that are almost in perfect condition than to fix them.

Well, not this time. So F*U Jeff Bezzos!

Getting to the point where we found out the fuse had failed took about 3 hours, but the party was far from over.

The following day, I did a 50 km round-trip to my dad’s house to replace the motor fuse and clean the motor bushings so it wouldn’t fail again.

This allowed me to spend some time with my dad and being a live witness to his remarkable soldering skills honed over decades working as an electrical engineer.

Not to mention the free class in electronics, including the science behind electrical motors and the ingenuity behind the minds that created them.

I learned why single-phase electrical motors have such low starting torque. Why their coil filament is so thin. Why do they consume a lot less when AC current is applied vs. DC current. The trick used in the rotor to force them to get started. How current consumption decreases as a motor heats up, and many more things 99% of the world will never care to ever learn.

In the end, I spent close to 8 hours of my oh so valuable time devoted to fixing a stupid kitchen fan.

Financially speaking, the whole project was a complete disaster.

But, learning something new, the satisfaction of fixing something, and above all, spending time with my father…

How much more worth was that?

You know it… priceless.

For everything else… MasterCard.

Peace, Love, and Kitchen-Fan Cookies.

​

Miguel @ Grumo.com

P.S. What else is new? I still plan to get back to more regular updates, courses, and YouTube tutorials. So stay tuned, and in the meantime… enjoy living!