Late 90’s Alaskair 48” Industrial Ceiling Fan

Filmed on June 18th 2023

Let me introduce you to what's possibly the first Indonesian market knockoff to the National F-EY129/149, & its global variants, the joint Maspion & Sheng Yuan made Alaskair AM CF 240! And this is one of the biggest childhood fans of mine, both figuratively & literally! Let me take you on a time machine trip back to my kindergarten ages.

My kindergarten was built in the early-mid 80's, and it had TONS of 80's fans in it. Fans I most remember are 3 12" light brown Sanyo ventilating fans, 2 of which are installed side by side on a ground floor classroom, the place where it used to sit is now a small pool, a 16" Sanyo industrial ventilating fan in the teacher's room, it never ran & the switch cover + shutters were completely missing so it windmilled all the time, at least 2 Sanyo 12" wall fans with clear blue blades, and 2 48" industrial ceiling fans just like this one but branded Maspion in the church's high ceiling, the controls of which are located in the back stage. Everytime we had events in that church that needed us students to go in the back stage, I'd always play with the 2 controls which are mounted unusually low that my little self could reach it without difficulty. I can't remember what setting I used to put the fans in, but those fans were always slow. The church was so big & the ceiling so high that I don't think any air made it to the seats.

My kindergarten was renovated sometime in the 2010's, where all those old fans unfortunately got thrown out. I still miss that old building till this day, and I cringe everytime that school institution renovates its older buildings, because I've watched with my own 2 eyes during early senior high, how poorly they treat the old fans. I'm still mad at my junior high vice principal for his insistence of not allowing me to save an 80's Sanyo 16" orbital fan, among many others, only to watch the room where those fan are mounted being demolished with the fans still in it. Needless to say, those once pristine fans is now part of someone's home appliance through recycling.

Anyway, kindergarten me would've never expected 2023 me to have obtained variants of every single fan in my kindergarten, but that statement is true! I'm not too sure how to feel about that, so let's finally get to the fan itself!

As I said, as far as my knowledge, this is the first ceiling fan ever offered in Indonesia that looks like a Matsushita. This exact fan was sold in 48" & 56" under the Alaska, Alaskair, Maspion & Uchida brand, and I think in that order as well, before Uchida finally switched the triangular center badge to a flat one & later shifting to a much thinner steel fan blade with 'M' stampings on it. This fan still exists till this day, back under the brand Maspion, but with outrageously less quality. I would argue this fan also gave birth to the 52" Millenium series, as those are basically this fan with trimmed down 56" blades, without the plastic cloak around the motor, dipped in stainless steel. This fan is a very nice in between point of full blown National ceiling fans & crappy CMCs, both price & quality wise.

If you've seen my custom brown 48" ceiling fan or any Uchida Milleniums, you'd know how the actual motor looks like, a flat bottom stamped steel spinner motor with vents on top. The motor size is slightly smaller than 90's Matsushita motors & these are known to drift their capacitor values once they reach about 7 years old, slowing down to a slouch. But this one is still nearly factory fresh, so performance is awesome!

Speaking of performance, the bearings on this fan when I got it was very stiff, but I've used this fan for awhile, so everything is now nice & smooth. This fan's performance is about on par with actual 90's Matsushita. A quirk you might not know with all iterations of this fan, even the latest ones, is that the blade is about 5mm wider than 90's Matsushita blades, you can actually notice the difference if you pay close attention. Blade pitch I'd say is slightly deeper than 90's Matsushita ceiling fans, but this fan spins at a slightly lower RPM, so it's possible that performance is actually exactly the same. This fan runs on a 2uF capacitor, which is 0,2uF higher than the capacitor value used on nearly all Indonesian Matsushita ceiling fans going back to the 80's. As for visual characteristics, this fan has a huge protrusive gold badge, canopies that are larger in size than 90's Matsushita canopies, and everything else including the speed controller resembles National's F-EY129.

Oddly enough, I don't associate this fan & its later iterations as 'knockoffs'. Perhaps it's due to the actually good quality of this particular iteration & the fact that it's been around all my life, far before any other Matsushita knockoff ceiling fans made their way to Indonesia.

#Alaska #CeilingFan