Top pick
This impressively powerful fan produces a remarkably pleasant breeze and works on a pedestal, floor, or tabletop. Just make sure to recharge it between uses.
The Shark FlexBreeze Outdoor & Indoor Fan is an impressively robust cordless fan that offers a modular setup and a variety of thoughtful features, allowing you to carry that cooling comfort with you everywhere you go. It works as both a pedestal fan and as a floor or tabletop fan, and it also comes with a misting attachment that you can hook up to a hose to create a gentle drizzle. This model is more expensive than other cordless fans, but it’s the only one that delivered everything we were looking for. It’s also survived three summers outdoors so far, bearing the brunt of all the neighborhood kids, which is a testament to its reliability.
It can work as a pedestal fan or a tabletop fan. As its name suggests, the FlexBreeze provides a range of flexible setup options. Its 3-foot-tall pedestal mount doubles as a charging station. While that 15-pound stand is portable enough on its own, you can also pull the FlexBreeze out of the base by its carrying handle and convert it into a smaller, tripod-mounted fan — the perfect size for a tabletop or the floor.
Its 13-inch blade produced one of the best breezes we encountered in our testing. In our tests, the FlexBreeze proved to be just as powerful as our plug-in room fan picks, with a wind-speed output ranging from a gentle 3 mph to a whopping 12 mph and an average speed around 8 mph. It was stronger than many of the other cordless fans we tested, with the exception of the shop fans that used power-tool batteries.
It has multiple oscillation settings for even better air circulation. The FlexBreeze allows you to choose a robust blast of directional air that curls around the room or a customizable oscillation arc that can span 45, 90, or 180 degrees. Controllable by remote, those oscillation options make this fan’s breezes some of the best of any fan we’ve tested, cordless or otherwise.
The remote control has strong magnetic storage. We found ourselves using the FlexBreeze’s remote more often than we typically do with other fans, for two reasons. First, it allowed us to remotely control the horizontal movement of the fan, a uniquely pleasant perk. Second, we didn’t lose the remote, thanks to the powerful magnetic storage slot on the back of the fan head.
The fan is surprisingly quiet. On its lowest setting, the FlexBreeze barely registered at 38 decibels in our measurements. Even with the fan on full blast, it measured only 54 decibels, which still kept it under the “normal conversation” level as defined by the National Institutes of Health. It was noticeably quieter overall than the shop fans we tested.
It’s one of the more durable fans we tested, and it has a generous two-year warranty. Although Shark doesn’t list an official IP rating for the FlexBreeze, we left ours outside for six months straight without a single problem. (The fact that it’s designed to work as a misting fan also gives us confidence in its water-resistant capabilities.) We can similarly tell you from experience that its thick plastic construction is able to withstand several tumbles down a concrete staircase (though you should still try to avoid tumbles). Shark’s two-year limited warranty is more generous than the coverage on any of the other cordless fans we tested, with the exception of the DeWalt and the Gale.
Did we mention the misting option? The FlexBreeze’s misting attachment hooks up to your garden hose for added relief, and it also works as a fun alternative to setting up a sprinkler in the backyard. (There’s a version of the fan available without the misting feature, if you want to save a few bucks, too.)
Flaws but not dealbreakers
The battery life and charging could be better. The FlexBreeze comes with a 4,000 mAh battery, which lasts about five or six hours on the middle setting. You’ll need to keep track of the included AC adapter as well, which uses a proprietary plug that may be difficult to replace. To extend the battery, turn off the oscillation feature; when activated, it reduces the run time by an average of roughly one-third.
The onboard controls are weirdly counterintuitive. The FlexBreeze has only three buttons on top: power in the middle, with fan speed to the left and oscillation to the right. That arrangement should be simple enough. But even after months of use, we still can’t get it right, as we instinctively end up pressing the leftmost button for power.
The LED indicator screen may baffle you. When you first turn the fan on, the five dots light up in order from left to right and then shut off, which makes you think that the fan is out of battery. If it’s at full charge, however, the battery indicator glows white with a line through it — also confusing.
The cleaning process is pretty frustrating. First, you have to remove the seven screws from the back of the fan head, some of which are deeply recessed. After that, you might also struggle to twist the fan grille off, especially if it accumulated any muck from sitting outside all summer. But hey, at least you can disassemble it, which is not possible on other fans we’ve tested.
It’s expensive. At around $200, the Shark FlexBreeze is comparable in price to most of the tool-battery-based shop fans we tested, but it still costs roughly twice as much as other similarly sized cordless fans (though you can save a little money and buy it without the misting fan).
