When you spend a lot of time in the garage, it gets pretty hot out there, and more so when summer does its usual summery thing. A fan would be really nice, but of all the fans out there, Ryobi’s little RCF4-120G cordless clamp fan has been a genuine surprise. On the surface, there’s not much to really say about this; it’s just a fan, but cordless and cable-less.
Yet, it’s a shockingly useful tool that I can no longer imagine what life in the garage would be like without it. Unlike most other small and portable fans that I’ve seen, which are either powered through your mains outlet or a USB cable, the Ryobi RCF4-120G clamp fan is fully cordless. Meanwhile, the battery slots neatly into the bottom of the fan.
Arguably, this is the biggest upside of this RCF4-120G cordless clamp fan, in that the pre-included 4V 2Ah battery is interchangeable and could be swapped out and then re-used with the other tools within Ryobi’s 4V Lithium range of tools, which are also USB-rechargeable. These Ryobi 4V 2Ah batteries are really tiny and durable, so you could easily chuck a few of these into your toolbox.
By default, each tool that you get, including the Ryobi RCF4-120G cordless clamp fan, comes with one 4V 2Ah battery. However, you can get the optional 3Ah battery for an extra cost (£24.99), which is plug-and-play, but with extra battery capacity, so you could work for longer. Or, you could even use these batteries as an emergency battery bank for your phone.
High Airflow, But Without The Added Racket
Using the Ryobi RCF4-120G cordless clamp fan is as simple as tapping a button on the back of the fan, as there are two speeds that you can access… Either with a single press (low speed – 2,300RPM) or a double press (high speed – 3,800RPM), while a third button press turns the fan off. I’m really surprised with how much air this tiny fan is able to move.
And, all that airflow, without making a racket. Ryobi claims that it’s outputting a mere 39 decibels, so it’s not that much more noise than you’d normally hear around the garage. Also, above that button, there’s a status indicator LED, which will light up green when it’s turned on, and it will turn red when you’re low on battery – a good time to whip out those spare batteries!
Beyond that, there’s a huge degree of versatility in Ryobi’s little RCF4-120G cordless clamp fan, and quite literally so, with as much as 325 degrees of rotation and 180 degrees of pivot. This should allow you a lot of freedom to move and position the fan accordingly. Similarly, the clamp on the bottom of the fan is more than just your usual clamp, with about 32mm of clamping capacity.
This makes it suitable for clamping it onto a wide range of surfaces, like desks. For us here at Motor Verso, where we spend time every single day working in a garage with little meaningful forms of ventilation, having this tiny fan that can clamp onto the bonnet, next to hot engine components, on a strut bar, or just clamping it onto the fender to cool myself down after a long day diving into the engine compartment, is a really cooling experience.
More Practical Than Just Cooling Down Myself
There’s an endless number of ways that you can use it, so long as you can find a place to clamp it down onto. In addition, another handy practical use case that I’ve found, besides cooling myself down on a hot and sweaty day, is actually cooling down stuff that I’m working on, or stuff that I would need to work on, but it’s otherwise too hot to handle.
When it comes to automotive applications, I’ve used this to cool down the cooling system in my car when I’m about to work on it, as well as having used the tiny Ryobi RCF4-120G cordless clamp fan to cool down wires and electrical components – such as soldering connections and fumes – that I’m working on or are testing. Thus, I’m able to make them cooler (literally) than it would’ve been without the fan.
To be clear, this cute cordless fan isn’t that strong to a point where a boiling hot coolant reservoir in a car that’s just been running, could magically cool itself down to something closer to ambient air temperature, for instance. However, it can handily cool down things that you’re working on to a point where they’re not as dangerous or as dodgy to handle anymore, which does make a big difference.
Otherwise, the only real alternative, which is what I had to resort to before, is needing to use a big, heavy, and bulky desk fan, which can be a tad sketchy and impractical – let alone if I’m even bothered to get it at all and having to plug it in. For £49.99, some could argue that for a small fan like this, it might seem a tad costly, but for the degree of mobility that it gives you, and with a good airflow, I’d say it’s worth it.
