This blog post is about beating the heat with Caframo’s latest product – Sirocco II fans. In short, they work. And, Caframo is a Canadian company that cares that their products work. Great care is given to each component – from brown-box packaging to product support. We we have seventeen Sirocco II fans on our boat.

As you can imagine, with seventeen fans, we have fans in the cabins, saloon, heads, and galley. The fans provide on-the-spot relief from the heat. We have a St Fancis 50 catamaran. They easily run on the power we generate from our solar panels.

Caframo makes many products, among them are specialty marine fans. We have enjoyed Caframo fans since July 2015.

Unfortunately, however, within a year of buying our fans some of them proved to be defective. When we called to complain, Caframo acknowledged the defect, and offered to replace all of our fans with the latest Sirocco II model for free. We paid for shipping. All they asked was for us to write a review about the Sirocco II fans. But beyond that, they provided no stipulations. That gives me license to provide an honest review.

Here is what the Sirocco II fans looked like when they arrived at our friend Dave’s house in Tavernier, Florida.

My husband, Rick, removed the bulk of the packaging and flew with the new fans back to the Dominican Republic (DR), where we were staying during hurricane season.

He installed the fans without incident. As a nod to product design – Rick said the installation was intuitive. In fact, the fans are so easy to use that they practically require no explanation.

But for due diligence I will explain the functionality. The Sirocco II fans have three speeds, and a timer function.

You can select the fan speed by pressing the fan button. Options are slow, medium and fast. The fan is quite powerful, especially given its size. The fan from base to top measures 13 inches. A fan installed at the base of a bed can easily be felt at the head of the bed.

While the fans are powerful, the blades are made of soft plastic so they will not cut off your fingers.

I’m less impressed with the timer function. But, only because key information is ‘subtle’ with the new product design. I shall explain.

With the Sirocco II fans, blue lights illuminate as you press the timer button. After close inspection of the fan, I can see that the timer function works in intervals of 3, 6, 9 and 12 hours.

A previous iteration of the Sirocco fan provided this key information more clearly.

In short, we are happy customers. With fans from Caframo we’re enjoying some very hot climates. With their wide, removable grills, the fans are easy to clean. We’ve had no need to use our air conditioning units, except when we want to put load on our generator.

The following picture was taken where we at we now: in St Thomas, US Virgin Islands.

I will write soon about our night sails across a Puerto Rico to get to St Thomas.