The ceiling fan that wobbles is telling you about its mount: the three-part box that holds it

Every dropped fan in every video starts the same way - not a bad fan, a bad box: a lightweight wall-box screw holding a bracket that was never designed for a machine that pulls on its own mount at every rotation. This is the ceiling-fan mounting page that pairs with the noise article: the wobble is the symptom, the mount is the cause, and the fix is done once, at install, on a ladder, before the blades spin.

The three parts that carry the load

• The box: the fan must land on a ceiling box stamped for fans (the words "ceiling fan support" or a weight rating are moulded into metal boxes for a reason) - and in a Nigerian concrete or timber roof, that means the box is fixed to the joist, rafter or a timber plate bolted to the structure, not to the board alone. A box on plastic anchors in plaster is the mount that fails next harmattan, not next year.
• The brace: between the structure and the box sits the real engineering - a brace or a mounting bar with through-bolts, the fan's mass travelling into the building's frame rather than a sheet of ceiling. For new installs this is the installer's conversation, and it is the desk's one firm sentence on this page: the ceiling box is the part you pay for once, in the installation, or pay for later in a room's panic.
• The rod and the pin: the down-rod's clevis hooks into the bracket's ball, and the little cotter pin plus the rubber isolator is what stops the whole fan's weight sitting on the wiring. The pin is the part everyone forgets and the part the drop-tests hinge on - the fan should hang on steel, and the wires inside the box should be slack enough that nothing they plug into is load-bearing.

The pre-switch checklist, from the floor

Blades on and tightened (the screws are matched to the blade; a mismatched pair walks loose within a week), the canopy hiding nothing you would want to inspect, then hands-on: two palms on the housing, the fan on at max for thirty seconds - the housing should feel of one mind with the ceiling, no walking, no ring. The noise article's balancing steps handle a wobble of centimetres; this page exists for the wobble of the whole fan, which is a mount calling for a ladder and a box swap, tonight.

What the desk will not approve

A fan hung on a light fitting's own box (those are made for bulbs, not spin), a box screw that spins in crumbled plaster, the extension of the mounting rod done with anything other than the manufacturer's rod (the rod is a load path - a hardware-store pipe is a joke the ceiling learns about), and any install where the earth wire is the one without a decision. Fans are the safest appliance in the house when mounted like engineering and the least forgiving when mounted like a lamp - the difference is one bracket and the honesty to check it before the room sleeps under the blades.