On 1/23/2017 4:37 AM, micky wrote:
Can you damage a case fan by vacuuming the air vents from the outside?

(I have a Dell Optiplex 775 with the original fan. )

It seems more than safe to me, but I happened to read the manual for a
Noctua fan and it says not to use a vacuum cleaner or it may apply
"excessive force to the fan". I find that hard to believe. I've pushed
on the vanes of other 3, 4, and 5" fans and they don't bend at all with
the kind of force vacuum cleaners exert. In fact I think they would be
hard to break. Are Noctua fans more fragile than others?


Theoretically, yes. Practically, no. I've cleaned computers, including
their fans, with compressed gas, brushes and vacuums since PCs came into
being and have yet to have a casualty and we're talking about literally
hundreds of units if you include all of the smart terminals we used at my
last job. If you were to have a fan die after a cleaning then it is far
more likely that it was defective to begin with than that you damaged it.

IMHO fans get ignored far too much (including by me) and people seem to do
nothing with them until they totally die, possibly causing more severe
problems, or at least until they start to sound like a threshing machine. I
try to make a point of listening to my various fan-equipped equipment at
least occasionally and running temperature-monitoring software on those
that are amenable. With five serious PCs, a notebook, and a NAS box there a
lot of fans that could go bad.