The leading Japanese electronics device maker Rohm Electronics is targeting Indian ceiling fan market by offering ready-made reference design solutions for driving brush-less DC motors in ceiling fans.
In domestic electric power consumption, ceiling fan consume a major amount of power/energy. Most of the present ceiling fans are induction motor based, which consume higher power compared to brush-less DC motors. Brush Less DC (BLDC) motors also generate lesser noise and easy to control the speed of the motor more efficiently compared to induction motors.
With these advantages, brush-less DC motor ceiling fans have hardly made any significant presence. The reason is high cost of brush-less DC motor ceiling fans, which are around Rupees 1000 expensive compared to induction motor based ceiling fans.
Rohm Electronics’ executives and tech experts claim the extra cost of the ceiling fan can be regained through saving power over one or two years of usage based on the how many hours fan going to be used in a day. They also see the cost of the brushless DC fans coming down over a period due to growth in volumes.
Rohm’s design is basically a made-in-India design, but the module is produced outside India. Rohm can offer IOT fans by leveraging India’s IOT product design capabilities.
A power saving initiative in India called “Bijli Bachao” lists some of the brushless DC motor fans sold in the Indian market and also a brief market analysis on its website bijlibachao.com. The research concludes saying “On the face of it, the price of the super efficient fans look high, but if we look at current and rising electricity costs, opting for super efficient fans makes a lot of sense especially to replace the high usage fans.
By Baishakhi Dutta
