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Despite what influencers may say, you don’t need to spend $99.99 on this Dyson HushJet Mini Cool Or $149.99 Shark Chill Pills To survive the summer when you leave the comfort of air conditioning. My family has found all the comfort they need to survive humid baseball games, hot concerts, and sweaty long walks with two affordable portable fans from… A Chinese company called JisuLife which has spent the past decade refining its hardware.
At the beginning of the summer, I purchased a pair of JisuLife Life10 S fans from Costco, at $25 CAD each (or $32.99 via Amazon), is among the core offerings offered by the company. JisuLife’s extensive lineup includes some fan models that cost close to $100 with features like reverse charging to power your phone and 100 different speed settings. I want all of these features, but my goal was to not spend several hundred dollars on personal coolers that can easily get lost or damaged during the chaos of summer activities.
The Life10 S’s functionality is relatively basic, but it’s also easy to use. A sliding power switch on the back prevents it from being accidentally turned on while swiping around inside the backpack, and a single button on the front cycles through five different fan speeds. There’s also a basic LCD display that shows the remaining battery charge when you first turn on the fan and the current speed settings. It’s simple, but the Life10 S does its job quietly and for a surprisingly long time.
When Dyson announced its first portable fan in April, I assumed the company with expertise in moving air had created a personal cooling device that would outperform everything else on the market. My husband loves their Dyson hair dryer, and I was sure the HushJet Mini Cool would be my secret weapon for surviving a hot and humid summer, even if it was $99. But having used both a Dyson personal fan and a $25 JisuLife replacement, I only reach for the latter when I brave the world without air conditioning.
Dyson’s HushJet Mini Cool features impressive engineering in an eye-catching design, and at its highest settings, it easily outperforms the JisuLife even with the Life10 S set to full power. But even at its lowest levels, the HushJet is loud with a high-pitched whine reminiscent of Dyson vacuum cleaners. I don’t mind that sound when it’s limited to short bouts of floor-level cleaning, but not when it’s coming from a small fan designed for use near your face and ears. The JisuLife fan produces sound at a much lower frequency, making it easy to carry around for hours, even if it’s far from completely quiet at full power.
What impresses me most about the JisuLife fan is how long its 5,000mAh battery keeps it running. At half power, which we find powerful enough to cool us down on even the hottest days, the fan ran for just over 16 hours before needing a charge. This is much longer than the amount of time my son spent at the water park. For comparison, Dyson estimates the HushJet Mini Cool will run for up to six hours at its lowest setting, and at full power, it shut down after just over an hour.
I didn’t even test the pricier Shark ChillPill, which combines a fan and a metal cooling pad that the company claims can lower skin temperature by up to 16 degrees Fahrenheit in seconds. You can cool by pressing it all over your body, but it only cools as long as the fan has power. SharkNinja estimates that the ChillPill will run for up to 11 hours at its lowest setting, or just an hour and a half at maximum power. This approach can be very effective, but I wouldn’t spend $150 to find out.
I also tested wearable neck fans that seem to be very popular among cashiers at my local Costco, but I didn’t find them to be as effective as I had hoped. The breeze spreads along the propeller and doesn’t feel as strong as a portable fan, and wearing it puts the motor directly under your ear at all times, so it’s a stable drone. I understand why it’s helpful, but it’s not an experience anyone in my family has enjoyed.
After a successful summer with these fans, I’m already anticipating sales on other JisuLife models, including… A hands-free version that you wear hanging from your neck. But I also expect these cheaper alternatives to remain the first things we pack when heading out on adventures for the rest of the summer and perhaps for years to come.
Photography by Andrew Leszewski/The Verge
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