As most already know by now, from my posts on reddit and review, the flashlight is IPX6, but the fan fails to meet any waterproof rating and should never have been used. The Wuben X1 Pro uses the same fan for IP65 but it’s concealed, whereas the HS45 has an open grill that offers no protection from moisture at all. I informed Barry Dong about it and Sofirn are now informing customers to not wash under water to clean the fan, despite the manual instructing one to do exactly that.
The fan bearings started to fail after 5-6 hours of testing, sounds horrible now. Another person on reddit has experienced the same thing.
1280 lumens / 170m sustained is fairly impressive though. Personally, I’ll never get used to having a fan next to my ears at full throttle!
Fans have their place for cooling, but this kind of tiny fan is always going to be a point of early failure.
At one point I was in the Aerospace business. We had occasion to test lots of small fans for cooling electronics. Even the most expensive ones simply did not make the longevity numbers. The only solution, as you mentioned, would be to make the fan easily user replaceable and to make sure the replacements are easily and cheaply available long term.
Personally, I will avoid any lights that depend only on a fan for long term operation.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure. I’m still amazed at open-frame alternators where everything’s exposed, just for the sake of ventilation. Slip-rings that can get splashed and dirtied, etc.
Things like space-heaters where the fan slows down to a crawl because the shaft and bearings are loaded down with oily dust… yecch. And that’s in relatively clean environments (eg, no dander or hairs from pets in an office setting, etc.).
Teeny little fans like those in the hs45 or LED bulbs wouldn’t do well with packed bearings. That’d eat up most of the power being used to move the little propeller.
