Everyone who owns a Hot Rod wants to stay up with the "crowd". Shiny and bright are the norm and engine cooling fans haven't been left out. These days you see a lot of people using electric cooling fans on their rides, that's OK if there are no hidden cooling issues but having a heating problem and switching to an electric fan hoping to solve it is a real bad choice.
Why is an electric fan a bad choice? well most people don't know that a motor driven fan or a viscus driven fan will pull FOOT pounds of air verses a electric fan that pulls INCH pounds of air, the difference is Huge. I learned this the hard way designing a cooling package for a mining operation and installing the best electric fans I could get what happened? the fans failed to pull enough air through the radiator to cool the unit off. we switched to a viscus driven fan and no more heating issue.
I see all over the web companies selling electric fans stating how much better performance you will get by switching to one and eliminating your motor driven fan and that's just not true I don't care how many cfm's they pull there is much more to it than that but you never see that mentioned on their sites. Also adding a second fan in front of your radiator can block air flow and hurt your cooling rather than help it.
I have customers come in every week with overheating troubles and the first thing I ask them is " what kind of fan do you have?" Many times they think electric is better and have spent hundreds of dollars up grading to and electric fan just to be told they need to switch back, that makes me very unpopular. Don't get me wrong I have nothing against electric fans and on the right application there fine, but switching from a motor driven fan to electric trying to solve an overheating issue is adding fuel to the fire.
Also the nylon mounting rods that they sell to attach most electric fans to the radiator will cause leaks in the radiator after a time by rubbing holes in the tubes. We tell our customers to mount the fan to the radiator brackets with a metal brace of some kind to eliminate leaks from happening.
Having an overheating issue with your vehicle? do yourself a favor and call someone who knows before you spend $500.00 on a custom fan setup that might make it worse! We in the industry are here to help.
http://www.intermountainradiator.com
