Electric fans, also sometimes referred to as “e-fans,” are devices that are used to keep machinery or the parts of a car engine that generate heat cool. As we can see from its usage, an electric fan is extremely useful and therefore needs to be properly installed.
However, to a lot of people’s dismay, because they do not know how to install an electric radiator cooling fan, their desired pieces of machinery are not even close to cooling down.
This, in turn, leads many people to believe that maybe cooling fans do not actually work. We beg to differ here since the biggest reason behind your cooling fan not working correctly is due to improper installation of the device.
In today’s article, we will teach you all about that, so be sure that you stick around with us till the end!
How to Install Electric Radiator Cooling Fan
In this section, we’ll detail the entire process step-by-step for you.
Choosing the Type of Fan
The very first thing that you will need to do before you get started on setting up your cooling fan is to choose the right type of fan for your desired piece of machinery, whether it be your car or some other engine.
Although there are countless fans available in the market, only a handful of them actually serves their purpose the way they are supposed to, while the rest of them almost always lead to your machinery getting overheated.
One of the cheapest and best ways to choose a fan would be to transfer a fan that was previously used on some other piece of machinery that is similar to yours to your own desired gear.
However, in case if you fail to find any fan that would be good enough for your equipment, simply look for a cooling fan that meets both of the requirements that we are about to mention:
- The fan should be able to move at least 2500 CFM (cubic feet per meter) of air from the equipment it is fit on
- It should have a shroud that will let air flow correctly over the whole span of the radiator.
Fan Shroud
For those of you who might be confused as to what shrouding means, do not worry because we have got you covered on that as well.
If your fan has a shroud, then it will be able to evenly pull in air from all surfaces of the radiator instead of simply sucking in air from the small area located directly in front of the fan blades or from the middle of the blades and the radiator.
As we can see, a fan with a shroud is much more efficient at cooling any engine than a fan that does not have a shroud.
Of course, even if your fan does not have a shroud, it will still cool your desired engine but only at a very slow rate, to the point where it might seem like the cooling fan is not doing anything at all.
Installation
Now that we are clear about whether or not our fans should have shrouds and what kind of fan would be the best for usage on any engine, let us move on to see how these cooling fans can be installed in order to make sure that they can perform their best at any time of the day.
Being relatively lightweight, the fan can be set up rather easily. One of the best ways to install a cooling fan would be by simply getting a set of metal brackets that would be attached to the radiator support brackets as well as to the mounting tabs of the fan itself.
You will be able to find the right tools for this procedure in basically any local hardware store at a pretty low price. If you want to make the brackets, do make sure that you cut a couple of slabs of 3MM steel. Each piece should have measurements of 3.5” X 1.5” and 1.5” X 1.5”, respectively.
Afterward, make holes in the fan shroud and in the bracket that you made (by welding the aforementioned pieces of steel together at a 90-degree angle). The reason why you should drill holes in the fan shroud is so that you can later mount the brackets to the radiator with their help.
As mentioned previously, the method that we have just described is one of the best ways to install your cooling fan.
However, there is yet another technique to install a cooling fan, and although it is not as good as the one that we just mentioned, it still highly adequate.
If you wish to opt for an easier path when mounting your cooling fan, you can simply do so by securing the fan in place with the radiator with zip ties.
Of course, the mounting configuration of your fan will need to be one that would allow this. Otherwise, you will not be able to carry out this step.
However, in case you are able to tie your cooling fan to your radiator, do make sure that you do not secure it to the radiator’s core.
Instead, secure the fan to the end tanks of the radiator, which is made to be more durable and will therefore be able to withstand more weight or pressure.
Do try and steer clear of fan mounting ties, which are made of plastic, because they will only work to damage the fins of the radiator and hence shift almost all of the weight and force on the core, which will subsequently damage it.
Wiring Your Cooling Fan
Before we get started on how you should connect the wired network of your cooling fan to the engine or radiator of your car, let us take a look at the steps you should avoid taking.
A lot of times, people tend to connect their cooling fans to the cockpit where the built-in thermostat of the car lies. However, this step should be avoided because the thermostat that your car comes integrated with is very undependable.
When carrying out this idea, people have it in mind that they will turn the cooling fan on by themselves while the car is at rest or is only at the point of gaining some amount of speed after looking at the temperature gauge for some time.
However, it is also possible that one would forget about turning the fan on, and by the time they do turn it on, their car would be too heated up. Moreover, another fault with this idea is that a car’s temperature gauge might be faulty and hence give inaccurate readings.
The very first thing that you should be doing when installing the cooling fan to your car’s radiator is to place the fuse as close as possible to the EMF source of the engine.
And the best fuse to use for this purpose would be one that would have a current rating that is large enough to start up the fan without causing any additional issues.
Next up is the switch of the thermostat, which, as its name implies, is responsible for controlling the temperature in your cooling system.
What the switch does is that it regulates the rate of flow of water through the car’s radiator accordingly to the temperature of the engine.
Do make sure that you keep your thermostat clean because they tend to get sticky once dirty. Usually, all fan thermostats can be adjusted, but it still would not hurt to know in advance whether the one you wish to buy is variable or not.
Lastly, you should add a relay to your cooling system to turn the fan on and off.
Although your thermostat will have contacts capable of dealing with large amounts of current built-in them, since the job of a relay is to work with large currents, it will therefore bring about less damage to the thermostat, which otherwise would have happened due to the curving of the switching contacts of the thermo.
Conclusion
That is all for this article. We hope you now know how to install an electric radiator cooling fan. Thank you for reading till the end!
