Your ceiling fan is wobbling, humming or grinding: the five-minute triage

The sounds a fan makes are a short vocabulary, and learning it saves a replacement: each one names a specific part that is loose, dirty or dying. The triage below works in the order the fixes cost - a step stool, then a hand, then money.

Identify the voice

• Wobble (the blades trace an ellipse you can see): first - are the blade screws tight and the down-rod's little clevis pin at the ceiling hook seated properly? Most wobbles are a rod joint that has rattled half out, not bent blades. Then balance: a cheap clip-on weight set or a coin taped blade-to-blade until the run smooths tells you which blade is the light one, and a follow-up tightening of its screws is half of all "my fan needs balancing" jobs.
• Hum at low speed only: usually electric - the speed controller or, on older fans, the capacitor's frequency against the motor; if the hum climbs with the speed and the fan spins free by hand, the diagnosis is the capacitor (a shelf-cheap part any fan technician carries) and not the motor.
• Rumble that changes when you touch the housing lightly: mechanical looseness - the motor's retaining ring, the housing screws into the mounting bracket, or the light kit's glass - press-test each with one hand at the stick, and the noise follows the culprit; nothing else in the house diagnoses by touch as beautifully.
• Grinding or rasping, every rotation: dust-caked blades hitting the tolerance, a wire inside the cowl, or the motor's bushings running dry on older motors. Power off at the wall, spin the blades by hand: a gritty feel and you have the bushing verdict, and bushings are the part "my motor's dead" shops quietly replace for less than a new fan's tenth.
• Squeak that follows the switch-on, not the speed: the mounting bracket at the ceiling box - the whole fan sags a millimetre when it spins and the bracket's screws creak. The fix is re-tightening with the bracket pushed up, so undo its ceiling-box screws, lift, tighten - and if the ceiling box itself is the flexing part, that is the one fan job to call someone for, because the ceiling box holding a spinning weight is the house's problem, not the fan's.

What to do while you're on the stool

Dust the blades top and bottom with a pillowcase over each one (the cloth traps the harmattan load instead of the room's lungs - the same trick the harmattan-fire page recommends twice a month); look at the down-rod's cotter and the safety wire in the bracket for anything frayed; and with the fan off, give it a push and watch the coast: a fan that stops within a second or two twice in a row is telling you about the bearings before it stops politely mid-heat.

Skip the theatre

Balancing kits sold without checking the screws first; "silent" replacement fans bought while the old one's housing screws were never tried; and oil ports that modern sealed motors do not have - if the guide you read says to inject sewing-machine oil and there's no port on your motor, the advice is thirty years stale and the answer is the bushing or a new motor head, not a drip. The five-minute order - tighten, balance, clean, listen, then decide - resolves the majority of everything written here without opening a wallet.