I grew up in the country, so I’ve always slept best with very little noise, maybe a few frogs peeping or crickets chirping. But my boyfriend is a white noise kind of guy, and he can’t sleep without a fan going. We’ve been together so long, now I have a hard time sleeping without a fan. That being said, I don’t always want a fan blowing the room, particularly on a cold night. Alternatively, when we travel, a “fan” app is easier to use in a hotel then a travel-sized fan. If you need a fan alternative to fall asleep to, Sleep Fan is a solid option worth checking out.

What is it and what does it do

Main Functionality

Sleep Fan is an app that lets you choose between several fan sounds to fall asleep to.

Pros

• Multiple fan sounds and speeds to choose from
• Set the fan to run for a certain duration, helping you to wake up when your alarm goes off
• Simple UI

Cons

• Fan “speeds” change more in volume than they do in sound or pitch
• App closes when timer runs out, which some users might not like (there’s no fan equivalent of the “snooze button”)
• Make sure your phone has a full charge, or is plugged in: running any app for eight hours is bound to drain your battery
• Ad-supported

Discussion

When you open up Sleep Fan for the first time, you are presented with four different fans to choose from. There’s a white box fan, a sort of industrial circular fan, a fan that looks like a computer exhaust fan, and fan that looks like a combination of a science project and a windmill.

It’s worth noting that the fans have three settings each: fast, medium, and slow. These settings are a bit misleading: rather than sounding like a fan at different speeds, they are all the same noise at different volumes.

It would have been nice to have real fan recordings of fans at different speeds: sometimes, you need not only the drone of the fan, but a certain pitch as well.

The four fan sounds do sound noticeably different from one another, which is nice. I do wish that the app wouldn’t shut down automatically after the timer runs down: you have to start the timer up to get a sample of what the fans sound like, and having to constantly restart the app just to find the right sound for you is a bit annoying. That being said, the fans do provide nice white noise.

Conclusion and download link

If you need a simple solution for creating white noise in a hotel room or unfamiliar bed, Sleep Fan offers multiple ways for you to fall asleep. The timers make it easy to wake up gently, while the interface is quite simple. For those who need white noise to sleep, this app can help!

Price: Free

Version reviewed: 2.0

Supported OS: Requires iOS 4.0 or later

Download size: 6.2 MB

Sleep Fan on Apple App Store