I have a 98 Jeep Cherokee as my daily driver (my father is the Dakota
owner). I have watched the Viper Fan threads over the years with a
little curiosity. I am going to convert my mechanical fan setup to dual
electric fans this coming month.
My radiator measures 31" wide and roughly 11" tall. My factory fans
measure 14.5" for the mechanical and 11" for the electric auxiliary fan.
Currently I am thinking about replacing both fans with a dual 13" from
Derale that is rated for 4000 CFM's. The Derale unit measures 28.5"
wide x 13.82" tall, so I would match up well with the surface area of my
radiator. It can be seen at the following link:
http://www.derale.com/electricfans.shtml and is part number 16928. Any
opinions on service life of Derale's products?
Prior to that I was thinking Viper fan in place of the mechanical and
keeping my existing electric/aux fan. I know someone from Australia
that took a generic 16" electric fan and fitted it in place of the
mechanical fan and seems to be happy with it. His electric fan has a
low 2000+ CFM rating and it seems to be just about enough. I believe
the Viper fan is also a 16" fan, although I haven't found the dimensions
to verify this, but puts out a significantly larger CFM. If someone has
a part number and dimensions, I would appreciate it.
The reason I am leaning toward the dual from Derale, is I like the fact
that practically the entire radiator is covered by fan blades and more
of the core should benefit from more CFM than my stock unit. The viper
setup could pull more CFM's, especially when the aux fan is engaged, but
when the aux fan is off only approx. 60% of the radiator will be getting
the full benefit from the viper fan, whereas the Derale unit might be
more like 85%. Another benefit to the Viper Fan is my own assumed
better reliability, being an OEM piece. I would tend to trust that it
isn't going to die and leave me stranded as easily as a non-OEM piece
may. But of course I don't have any data to back this up with.
Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated.
-Marc-
Villa Park, IL
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