Jeff Waterman can't say enough about his big fans. No, Jeff isn't a rock star or Hollywood celebrity. He's facility manager for Friedman Brothers' Home Improvement Centers.

The fans are Big Ass fans -- literally. At diameters of 20 ft, they rotate slowly above shoppers and employees at the company's Santa Rosa and Sonoma, CA retail stores, both metal fabricated buildings. The Big Ass Fan Co, in Lexington, KY, makes the 10 bladed, hollow-core aluminum airfoil fan for a variety of applications -- industrial, manufacturing, warehousing, and commercial -- across the country.

For Waterman, the fans provide a solution to a cooling and heating problem he'd been grappling with since joining the company in 1993 and one the retailer had been facing since it opened in 1975.

In California, temperatures can get as high as 106 deg, baking the customers inside. On really hot days, says Waterman, shoppers were abandoning their shopping carts because of heat inside the building. "We didn't want to fry our customers," he says, "but air conditioning was impractical and expensive for us to consider."

Then Waterman read an article about the big fans in a trade magazine. "I fell in love with the idea," he says, "and I had to see the fans." So Waterman drove to Riverside, CA to see an installation. That visit sold him on the concept, and on the fans, too.

The company bought five for their 80,000 sq ft Santa Rosa building and later bought another for its 25,000 sq ft Sonoma facility. "It really keeps things a lot cooler here in the summer," says Waterman.

Fans don't cool the air, but they do make the air feel cooler. Moving air helps moisture evaporate off skin, taking heat with it. With fans, the ambient temperature can feel 5-10 deg cooler than it actually is.

Many companies rely on high-velocity fans to move air in their facilities, not realizing that the airflow from these noisy fans dissipates quickly over a short distance. And fan speeds of over 300 fpm can create an air current that is unpleasant and disruptive.

The Big Ass Fans that Friedman Brothers installed operate on the principle of convection currents. A slow-moving overhead fan generates a column of air equal to its diameter. When that column of air hits the floor, it radiates outward until it hits a wall, partition, or column of air from another fan. There, it's forced upward to the ceiling where it circulates down through the fan's blades. Over time, the air movement gains momentum, creating cooling breezes throughout the facility.

"You can feel the air movement throughout the building," says Waterman. "It's been great in the winter, too," he adds. Most people don't realize that it can get downright chilly in California, with temperatures as low as 26 deg. In a 500 ft long building with a high gabled roof, the five fans help bring all the rising heat down to employee and customer level, mixing the warm upper air with the cooler air that naturally sinks to floor level.

This destratification of air can help decrease a facility's heating bill because the thermostat can be set at a lower level to achieve the same degree of warmth. According to Michigan Consolidated Gas Co, compensating for this kind of stratification of air in high-ceilinged facilities is the single biggest waste of energy in buildings today. With a 1-1.5 hp motor, the Big Ass Fans offered Friedman Brothers a relatively inexpensive and efficient way to destratify the air. Based on typical power rates, the fans use just five cents' worth of electricity per hour.

The real beauty behind slow-moving fans is that the air generated by a single 20 ft fan can cover a 10,000-15,000 sq ft area from a ceiling height of 45 ft. The same space would otherwise require at least 15 standard ceiling fans, which together would not have enough throw pattern to create sensible air movement at or near the floor.

And the Big Ass Fan Co has made sure their fans are even more efficient. Taking its cue from motor sport, the company has recently added a wickerbill to the trailing edge of the fan blades. Also known as a Gurney flap after racecar driver Dan Gurney, who advanced the technology, the wickerbill creates 50% more air movement off the fan blade, allowing the fans to operate at lower speeds while still generating a large volume of air.

Friedman Brothers employees and customers alike love the fans. "The fans are real workhorses and have done a better job than we expected," explains Waterman. In fact, Waterman has sold other companies on the product, from another retailer down the street to the manufacturer of Oakley sunglasses.

"I love them," says Waterman, a truly big fan of the Big Fans.