Warning: stop vacuuming your PC case, you are cooking your fans

Everyone on here says just hit your dusty tower with a shop vac every few months, and I did that for about 3 years until my rear exhaust fan started grinding last week. What actually happened is the vacuum spins the fan blades way past their rated speed and burns out the bearings, which is why I was replacing fans every 8 months at $15 a pop. Now I pull the side panel, hold each fan blade still with a pencil, and use a $6 can of compressed air with short bursts, plus a cheap makeup brush for the fins. My current fans have run quiet for 14 months, and I live in Phoenix where dust is a full time job. Has anyone else killed a fan this way, or am I the only one who learned it the hard way?

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uma_webb288d ago

Learned this one the expensive way too, same deal with the shop vac. What got me was my GPU fans, you can't even hold those still with a pencil because of how they're set in the shroud. So now I just unplug the whole rig and blow everything outside with air, then wipe the blades down by hand with a damp cloth. Takes longer but I haven't bought a fan in two years. Also the makeup brush tip is solid, those things get into the fins way better than a q-tip ever did.

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