Blog 9: Ceiling Fan Physics

This weekend, as I was thinking of something to write about for this blog, I turned on my living room ceiling fan because the room was pretty hot. As I pulled down on the hanging switch, the fan started spinning, since it was pretty hot I pulled down the switch again to increase the speed of the fan. I realized that the ceiling fan switch is similar to the light dimmer switch we experimented with in our lab. We learned that when you increase the length of a resistor, you increase the resistance too, which affects the amount of current in the circuit because I= v/R. As the resistance increases the current decreases and vice versa, causing the fan to spin faster or slower. Since my ceiling fan starts at a lower speed that increases every time I pull the switch, the length of the resistor must decrease with every pull. After pulling the switch 4 times, the fan begins to slow down because the circuit is broken because the switch is probably touching an insulator instead of a conductor.