The Best Way To Clean Your Ceiling Fan

Ceiling fans are found all across the United States. Homeowners everywhere use these fans to thrust air into a state of motion in their interior living spaces. During the summer, you'll want fan blades to spin counterclockwise in order to push cool air down through the center of the room. However, during the winter, a clockwise-spinning fan can create an uplifting transfer of heat (per Hunter Fan Company).

Indeed, the ceiling fan is an ingenious invention that helps regulate the temperature inside your home alongside more technical installations like an HVAC system or radiator setup. But they can also create an immense burden on your household if they're not cleaned regularly.

Ceiling fans are often found with a buildup of dust and gunk coating their blades. This may subtract from the visual appeal of a room, but it's also a health concern that you must tackle as a homeowner looking to give yourself and your family the best possible life. Fortunately, cleaning a ceiling fan should be a simple task for most people and will give you access to a healthier and more beautiful home.

The best way to clean your ceiling fan is to use an old pillowcase. This might sound like a strange way of dealing with dust, but a pillowcase is a perfect tool for capturing the buildup without spraying it all across the room (via The Home Depot). The main issue here is that by cleaning the fan in a more traditional manner, you can fling dust particles and any other buildup on the fan blades down from the top of the room onto everything that sits below. Instead, you'll want to capture the grime as you remove it to simplify your task and keep the room dust-free.

By placing the opening of a pillowcase over a fan blade and pressing down when you've reached the interior section, you'll effectively trap everything sitting on top of the blade inside of the pillowcase. Just pull this makeshift duster across the surface of the fan blade and back out to the outer end. This will strip away dust and grime from the ceiling fan without launching it into the air. Repeating this process with the same pillowcase for each fan blade that you wish to clean will revolutionize the way you think about cleaning your home's ceiling fans.

Cleaning your ceiling fan regularly will improve the air quality in your home immensely. Ceiling fans act as a magnet for dust and will attract an enormous volume of it in a very short time. Science ABC reports that the movement of your ceiling fan creates static electricity in the upper portion of a room. As a result, the fan attracts tiny particles of dust that collect on the blades from the fast-moving air. 

The Washington Post suggests cleaning your home's fans at least every two months to prevent the buildup of dust. This will make for a much more enjoyable living space. However, for extremely dusty homes, you may find that cleaning the fans every month (or even more often) provides superior results. That being said, you may also consider changing your AC filters more often or investing in a cheap air purifier to seriously limit the amount of dust in your home.