Every summer there is a stretch where the patio stops being usable. Too hot to sit still, and heading inside means giving up the afternoon. The Dreo TurboCool 711AS is a $179.99 outdoor misting fan that hooks straight to a garden hose, moves 2,022 CFM, and throws mist about 23 feet. Dreo sent one over and it has been parked in the yard since. There is one condition where a misting fan is the wrong purchase, though, and it is worth knowing before you spend the money.
The Dreo TurboCool 711AS, model 711AS, carries an MSRP of $179.99 direct from Dreo, and you can check current pricing and availability on Amazon.com. A remote and a short supply hose ship in the box.
A misting fan does more than move hot air across your skin. It sprays fine water droplets into the airflow, where evaporation absorbs heat and can create a cooler-feeling zone around your patio, chair or table.
- Evaporation pulls away heat - water requires energy to change from a liquid into vapor, drawing some of that heat from the surrounding air and from your skin.
- The fan carries the cooling effect farther - moving air distributes the mist while also helping sweat and water droplets evaporate more efficiently.
- Fine droplets help limit wetness - smaller droplets are more likely to evaporate before reaching you, although some moisture may still be noticeable depending on the setting and weather.
- It works best when the air is dry - hot, low-humidity conditions allow more water to evaporate, while high humidity reduces the amount of cooling a mister can provide.
- A hose keeps the mist supplied - the direct garden-hose connection avoids tank refills and lets the system continue misting as long as the water remains connected.
- Unlike Some Mister Fans, This One Is Designed To Attach To A Garden Hose Or Directly To The Spigot
- Twelve Speeds, Four Modes, And Virtually Silent Operation
- The App, The Remote, And Talking To It From The Grill
- Do Not Buy A Misting Fan If You Live In A Super Humid Area
- Dreo TurboCool Is Designed For Outdoors - But Bring It Back Inside When It Rains
- Who The Dreo TurboCool Misting Fan Is For (And Who Should Just Get A Dry Fan Instead)
I am not new to this brand. A Dreo PolyFan 508S is running in my office right now instead of the air conditioning, and their PR team has kept me in new units to test for years. Indoors I had the problem solved. Outdoors I had a chair, some shade, and a losing argument with July.
I tested it on a 90-degree day, after a stretch of building projects in the yard and a round of chicken on the grill. By the time I sat down I was sweaty and overheated, and the honest plan was to sit for five minutes and then go inside and quit for the day.
With the fan oscillating back and forth and the mist riding over me, I felt cooler within seconds, and I never ended up wet. The fan is doing the work there. It throws the mist far enough that most of it evaporates on the way, and evaporating water pulls heat out of the air it passes through. Sit at normal chair distance rather than right on top of the nozzles and what reaches you is cool air, not spray.
Dreo rates the perceived drop at up to 12 degrees. I did not put a thermometer on it, so take that as their number and not mine. What I can tell you is that I stopped thinking about the heat and stayed out there, which is the entire thing I wanted from it.
Unlike Some Mister Fans, This One Is Designed To Attach To A Garden Hose Or Directly To The Spigot
There is no reservoir to fill so this isn't going to run out of mist mid-beer. Instead, the 711AS threads onto a garden hose the same way a spray head does, and once it is on, the water supply is continuous. No refilling a tank at the kitchen sink every twenty minutes.
The supply hose in the box is short, a few feet, meant to bridge the fan to a hose you already own. So the real question is where your spigot is. If it is close to where you sit, you connect straight to the house and none of this matters. If your seating is across the yard, you are running a garden hose out to it, and the 9.8 foot power cord means an outdoor outlet has to be in reach too. Plan that run before the fan shows up rather than after.
Everything else about the setup is uneventful, which is the correct amount of eventful for a fan.
Twelve Speeds, Four Modes, And Virtually Silent Operation
Twelve speeds is more range than an outdoor fan strictly needs, and the bottom of the dial gets more use than the top. Dreo rates the fan between 20 and 49 dB across that range, so at the quiet end you can leave it running through a conversation. Wide open it moves 2,022 CFM at 33 feet per second and pushes air out to 42 feet, well beyond where the mist itself lands, and at that point you hear it working.
The four modes and the selectable oscillation cover most backyard situations. Lock it at 30 degrees and it holds on a single chair. Open it to 150 and it covers a table of people, which is the setting I would run with the guys over for a game day cookout. The whole unit stands 42 inches tall on a 13 inch base, about the footprint of a side table.
For anyone concerned about fan noise it is also worth mentioning that you don't want this placed too close to your chair - the misting is designed to pull heat out of the air through evaporation, not to get you wet or leave damp marks on your clothes.
The App, The Remote, And Talking To It From The Grill
Smart appliances usually cost you twenty minutes and some patience at network setup. This one joined instantly and handed me phone control without a single retry. I do not know what Dreo does differently from everyone else, but it has held true across every device of theirs I have set up.
The app carries speed, mode, oscillation width, the 12 hour timer, and a child lock, with Alexa and Google voice control if you would rather call out an adjustment from the grill without putting the tongs down. The bundled remote is worth using too, finished in a carbon fiber look rather than the hollow plastic clicker most fans ship with.
Do Not Buy A Misting Fan If You Live In A Super Humid Area
This is the part to understand before you spend $179.99, because it decides whether this fan is brilliant or a disappointment in your yard.
Evaporative cooling only works when the air has room to absorb more water. The drier the air, the bigger the temperature drop. As relative humidity climbs, that capacity shrinks, and research on misting fans in hot, humid conditions puts the practical cutoff around 60 percent relative humidity, past which the cooling effect largely stops and you are left with a fan that is also making things damp.
There is a second trap in the same physics. Run a mister continuously in a tight, semi-enclosed space like a screened porch and it raises the humidity of the pocket of air it is sitting in, which can push you past that threshold using nothing but its own output. Open air and intermittent misting are how you stay on the right side of it. If you live somewhere the July dew point sits high for weeks at a time, be honest with yourself about that before ordering, and put the money toward air conditioning or a straight high-velocity fan instead.
The good news is that the 711AS runs fine as a plain fan. Leave the hose off and you have 2,022 CFM of airflow with no water involved, which is the right setting on a sticky day and the reason this does not become a doorstop in a humid week.
Dreo TurboCool Is Designed For Outdoors - But Bring It Back Inside When It Rains
The IPX4 rating covers splashing water from any direction, so its own mist and a bit of sprinkler overspray are fine. Splash-resistant is not rainproof, though, so I move it under cover ahead of a storm rather than trusting it to ride one out. At the end of the season, disconnect it and let the water line drain before the first freeze, the way you would with any hose bib or irrigation line.
Being straight about the limits of this review: I have had it a short time, in dry heat, in open air. I have not run it through a full season, I have not left it outside through a storm to find out, and I have not put it up against a muggy stretch to measure how much of the cooling survives. When I have, I will say so here.
Who The Dreo TurboCool Misting Fan Is For (And Who Should Just Get A Dry Fan Instead)
If you spend real time in your yard between June and September, cooking, working on projects, or just sitting outside with people, this is the piece of gear that keeps you out there instead of retreating to the couch. It is also the right buy for anyone who has been fighting the same problem with a box fan and an extension cord and getting nowhere, because moving hot air is not the same job as cooling it.
Skip it if your spigot is nowhere near where you sit and you have no interest in a hose across the lawn. Skip it if your summers are humid enough that evaporation has nothing to work with. And if what you need is better air inside the house, that is a different product line entirely, closer to the PolyFan 508S sitting in my office or the MC706 tower if you want one unit doing heat and cool year-round.
One last practical note. At 48 watts you can leave this thing running all afternoon and never think about the power bill, which matters more than it sounds, because the failure mode with outdoor gear is not that it breaks. It is that you stop bothering to drag it out. This one has not left the yard since I set it up. For current pricing and availability, check Amazon.com.