These are the fans I'd buy to keep cool in UK heatwave hell

Hot sun casts orange-red glow over a desert

(Image credit: Getty)

published 10 August 2022

It's Heatwave 3.0! If you haven't bought fans, portable air conditioners and water guns during the first two heatwaves, now is the time to buy. That's because this UK heatwave is said to be the most prolonged of the lot, with temperatures going as high as 35ºC in some places. That may be very pleasant outdoors, but it can be hellish in your home.

What should you do to keep cool in the heatwave, then? For starters, we have guides to the best fans and the best portable air conditioners. For those in search of something a little more fancy, there's also a list of the best Dyson fans. If the temperature reaches the high 30s, the effectiveness of fans starts to wane, but if they stay in the high 20s to mid 30s, what I've picked out here may come in very handy. I've tested an awful lot of fans over the years, and an increasing number of air con units in more recent times.

As soon as I've finished pulling all the blinds, closing all the curtains and doing all the other necessary things to cool your home on a hot day, I'll be reaching for my two favourite fans for properly hot weather. They're both from a Great British brand, and stand ready to take on the great British heatwave (part 3).

Best fan for cooling: MeacoFan 1056

Best portable, cordless fan: Meaco 260c

Please note: although 14 hours is the maximum battery life, if you run this dinky fan at its higher power settings, you will get considerably less than that – come on, it's only £35, you can't expect miracles.

The good news is that it works pretty well even on its lowest speed, and can be used plugged in with a standard USB-C cable when you're at home. But do make sure the MeacoFan well charged if you're taking it out, as few things are more unpleasant than losing your cooling breeze all of a sudden, when you're sat on a packed train that's heated to 35ºC.

More of the best fan and air conditioner deals to beat the heatwave

MeacoFan 1056 Air Circulator in tasteful room

What makes the MeacoFan 1056 so good?

The main thing I love about this fan is that it is extremely powerful, but remarkably quiet and compact. There is also a pedestal version, which naturally lacks that compactness, but the desktop version is, if anything, smaller than your average fan, although a bit longer. I once tried that hack where you place a bowl of iced water in front of a fan, in order to get cooler air blown into the room. I don't know if that was all that effective, but I did have to reposition the bowl several times, as the MeacoFan 1056 kept blasting the water out and onto my coffee table.

While truly hot days render most fans impotent, the 1056 is powerful enough to make you feel cooler, rather than that you're simply having hot air blown around the room. Better yet, it manages to do this without it feeling oppressive, and without creating a massive racket.

While the MeacoFan 1056 could not be described as stunning looking, its appearance is nothing to complain about, and it's also very cleverly designed. It can rotate in three dimensions through almost 360º, rather than just oscillating from side to side as a boring old Dyson does. There's a sleep timer, a built-in light, no fewer than 12 speed settings and an 'Eco' setting, which raises and lowers the speed based on the temperature of the room. It's all very simple and yet highly effective, thanks to Meaco's jet engine-style fan technology.

All the controls are accessible via a remote, which can also be magnetically attached to the centre of the fan for safe keeping. There's no app control as yet, but that doesn't seem like too big a loss.

There's also another great reason to buy the MeacoFan 1056: for such a design classic, it is extremely cheap. With the heatwave set to continue, and high temperatures apparently likely to become more commonplace in future, thanks to climate change, can you afford to be without one?

Some fan deals right now

Duncan is the former lifestyle editor of T3 and has been writing about tech for almost 15 years. He has covered everything from smartphones to headphones, TV to AC and air fryers to the movies of James Bond and obscure anime. His current brief is everything to do with the home and kitchen, which is good because he is an excellent cook, if he says so himself. He also covers cycling and ebikes – like over-using italics, this is another passion of his. In his long and varied lifestyle-tech career he is one of the few people to have been a fitness editor despite being unfit and a cars editor for not one but two websites, despite being unable to drive. He also has about 400 vacuum cleaners, and is possibly the UK's leading expert on cordless vacuum cleaners, despite being decidedly messy. A cricket fan for over 30 years, he also recently become T3's cricket editor, writing about how to stream obscure T20 tournaments, and turning out some typically no-nonsense opinions on the world's top teams and players.

Before T3, Duncan was a music and film reviewer, worked for a magazine about gambling that employed a surprisingly large number of convicted criminals, and then a magazine called Bizarre that was essentially like a cross between Reddit and DeviantArt, before the invention of the internet. There was also a lengthy period where he essentially wrote all of T3 magazine every month for about 3 years.

A broadcaster, raconteur and public speaker, Duncan used to be on telly loads, but an unfortunate incident put a stop to that, so he now largely contents himself with telling people, "I used to be on the TV, you know."