Top pick
This comfortable, durable neck fan has enough battery to last most of the day — plus a one-year warranty, just in case it fails.
The JisuLife Neck Fan Life3 is a simple but effective cooling device that sits comfortably around your neck, directing gentle wafts of wind up toward your head. With three speed settings and a ring of 88 air slots for the fan to exhaust through, it can cover everything above your neck without blowing directly into your face (which would be annoying).
Plus: It comes with a one-year warranty. That doesn’t sound like much, but in the realm of cheap disposable plastic cooling devices, it’s practically gold. If you need a little extra oomph, the JisuLife Neck Fan Life4 is basically the same model with more battery and a stronger fan.
It has one of the best fan-speed ranges we’ve seen. With three power settings, the JisuLife fan can go from a subtle breeze at 1.3 mph to a powerful gust at nearly thrice that speed. It’s easily the most powerful fan we’ve tested, even slightly besting our other picks. Meanwhile, there are other fans like the Egopp 1S Cool Down that maxed out at 1.3 mph.
It’s also especially easy to use. The JisuLife fan has only one large button to cycle through the fan speeds. On the front right side, the button is recessed just enough that most people should be able to find it by feel without having to remove the neck fan and look for the spot to press. Most of the other models we evaluated had small rectangular buttons, often hidden on the underside or back of the fan, that were difficult to locate and activate without taking the fan off to look for them.
The fan’s streamlined style is both subtle and comfortable. It has a discreet design that doesn’t attract much more attention than if you were wearing a pair of over-the-ear headphones around your neck; in fact, several people mistook the JisuLife fan for a pair of Beats headphones when they saw it.
It weighs only about half a pound. You’ll barely even notice it while wearing it, and its 8.5-inch diameter should allow it to comfortably fit around most necks without sticking to sweaty skin. It’s available in a variety of colors as well.
The rechargeable battery should have just enough juice to get you through the day. Like most of the fans we tested, the JisuLife fan comes with a 4,000 mAh lithium-ion battery that can last up to 16 hours or so, depending on the fan-speed setting. It’s a particularly good companion for a full workday, especially if you’re outdoors. If you think you need a longer lasting fan, get the JisuLife Neck Fan Life4, which upgrades the battery to 5,000 mAh.
It usually costs around $30, about the same as other, similar neck fans. Plenty of other brands sell nearly identical devices for around the same price — including the Penkou Portable Neck Fan, which we previously recommended as our top pick, as well as our runner-up pick from Gulaki.
But unlike those other neck fans, the JisuLife fan actually has a warranty. Should anything happen to this neck fan, JisuLife offers a one-year limited warranty, along with some other basic customer support options. It’s not much, but it’s more than we can say about nearly every other neck fan brand we tested. Unfortunately, the JisuLife warranty doesn’t cover physical damage from accidents or natural disasters. If it’s any consolation, our test unit was durable enough to survive several drops off a moving bicycle and onto the pavement — though admittedly, we have not yet worn it through a tornado.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
Neck fans can sound annoying, and the JisuLife fan is no exception. In our tests, we measured the volume of the JisuLife fan at 46 decibels on the lowest setting and up to about 56 decibels on high — which does make it quieter than any other fan we tested, and comfortably below “normal” conversation levels of 60 to 70 decibels. That said, the volume of the fan at higher speeds can interfere with conversations a bit. I already have some auditory-processing problems to begin with, so sometimes it would take me a moment to realize that the problem was the fan, not just me. Keep it running on low, however, and you should be fine.
It is still largely a piece of disposable plastic. We hope that anyone shopping at the low end of the neck fan market is not bringing a discerning eye for high-quality craftsmanship. You’ll find no impressive feats of design or engineering here to celebrate. The JisuLife fan has tested well for us over several hot months, and we’ve seen an uptick in quality since these devices debuted.
