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- Beautifully designed and well made
- Misting pod offers effective cooling
- Poor airspeed
- Loud
- Expensive
You only have to take one look at Shark’s latest handheld fan – the ChillPill – to see that it’s destined to become popular on TikTok, just like the brand’s FlexBreeze HydroGo Misting Fan. It ticks all the social media boxes: it’s neatly designed, colourful and its modular design is unusual – I’ve certainly not seen anything like it. It’s also nicely made.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite live up to its promise. When it comes to performance, I was simultaneously underwhelmed by the ChillPill’s air speeds and overwhelmed by the noise it produced. Add to that a price tag that sits well over £100, and this fan becomes a difficult pill to swallow.
Shark Chill Pill: What do you get for the money?
The ChillPill is, according to the marketing fluff, a “3-in-1 personal cooling system”. It consists of two parallel cylinders joined in the middle by a hinge. One of these cylinders houses the battery and control dial, while the other contains the fan itself, at the end of which slots one of three attachments: the fan cap, misting pod or the cooling plate (more on these in the next section).
It comes in a choice of six colourways, including “Glacier”, “Carbon”, “Haze” and “Dragon Fruit”, as well as “Matcha” and “Iced Latte”, which should give you a good idea of the ChillPill’s target demographic.
It charges via USB-C (a short cable is included in the box, but no plug) and has a runtime of 1-11 hours, depending which settings and attachments you’re using. As for operating the ChillPill, a rotating dial with a digital display is used to turn it on and off and adjust fan speed/settings. There’s also a small slide switch to lock and unlock the device, so it doesn’t end up going off when it’s in your bag or pocket.
The £130 asking price will get you the ChillPill with all three main attachments, as well as three spare wicks for the misting pod and a black drawstring bag. There is also a number of accessories you can add that are not included: a basic strap (£10), strap and sleeve (£18), wristlet (£6), crossbody strap (£10), clip attachment (£15) and clamp attachment (£20).
What features and settings does it have?
The ChillPill is, first and foremost, a portable fan. In this most basic mode with the fan cap attached, you can set up to ten speeds by rotating the control dial. All it does in this mode is move air.
Remove the fan cap and replace it with the misting pod attachment, however, and you add water-misting to the mix. The misting pod includes a tiny water tank that holds a little over 13ml of liquid according to my measurements, and provides around 15 to 20 minutes of continuous misting.
As with the HydroGo Misting Fan, you can adjust this to automatically dispense short bursts at regular intervals, or turn it off if you want to use the fan on its own. The misting pod comes with a small “wick” inserted, which looks a bit like a cigarette filter: this “acts like a straw”, drawing water in to allow the mister to function, and should be replaced about once a month. As I mentioned above, the ChillPill comes with three spare wicks to get you started, but you’ll need a healthy stock if you plan on using the misting function a lot – a replacement pack of three will cost you £7.
The final attachment is the “InstaChill” cooling plate – a metal disc that clips into the same location as the fan cap and misting pod that’s designed to be used in contact with your skin to help cool you down. It has two power settings and, according to Shark, can reduce skin temperature “by up to 9°C”. Unlike the regular fan cap and misting pod, the cooling plate cannot be used at the same time as the fan.
All three of these attachments simply twist and lock into place on the body of the ChillPill, and are easy to control via the dial and digital display. This display also shows you when the ChillPill’s battery is running low, with indicators for 100-70% (green), 70-30% (yellow), 30-5% (red) and less than 5% (blinking red).
How well does it perform?
Our fan speed tests
Misting and cooling plate aside, the Shark ChillPill is primarily a handheld fan. So, the first way to assess how well it performs is to measure its airflow speed. To do this, I used an anemometer to take readings from 50cm and 1m away. I repeated these tests in the fan’s low (1), medium (5) and high (10) settings, using the regular fan cap attachment.
At the ChillPill’s lowest speed, my anemometer didn’t register any readings at all, while at medium speed (setting 5) it only just picked up a 0.8m/s reading at 50cm away. And at top speed, I recorded 1.3m/s at a distance of 50cm and 1m/s at 1m.
These figures are rather underwhelming, especially when compared to Shark’s top speed claim of 7.5m/s (it’s implied in the small print that this was measured much closer to the air outlet). The ChillPill’s fan speeds are even more disappointing when compared to the £12 John Lewis Handheld & Foldable Desk Fan, a fan I’ll be returning to several times as a point of comparison in this review.
It offers three air speeds, which I measured at 1.3m/s, 1.8m/s and 2m/s at 50cm away, and 0.8m/s, 1.1m/s and 1.3m/s at 1m away. The breadth of the John Lewis fan’s airflow is also considerably wider than the ChillPill’s, no doubt thanks to the difference in fan diameter: around 10cm vs 4.5cm.
What do we like about the ChillPill?
These readings can only tell you so much. And despite a lacklustre airflow, I still felt a cooling benefit from the Shark ChillPill when using it day-to-day, whether at my desk or on the tube.
I love how it’s been designed, from the pleasing little clicks of its tactile control dial to the neat hinged design that allows you to position the fan at various angles on a tabletop. It feels just as nice in the hand too. Battery life is pretty good, and build quality is impressive: whatever else you say about the ChillPill, it certainly doesn’t feel like a cheaply made product.
What about its other attachments?
I already own the FlexBreeze HydroGo (coincidentally, in a similar shade of green to the ChillPill sample that I was sent), and I enjoy its misting feature. From eyeballing the hardware, the mister spouts on both of these fans seem to be the same, and my experience with the ChillPill’s misting pod has been an equally pleasant one.
While the mist can make things quite wet at close range (it didn’t take long for water droplets to form on my skin when I placed my hand quite close to the outlet), it offers effective cooling. It’s a shame its tiny water tank means continuous misting is relatively short-lived – if you’re out and about on a hot day, you might want to carry a small bottle of water from which to refill it. It’s also quite an expensive feature if you’re using it frequently enough to necessitate monthly wick replacements.
I wasn’t won over quite as much by the cooling plate. I took it out with me on a hot day after a visit to the gym and, while I found that it was cool to the touch, it just wasn’t as effective at cooling me down as the misting pod or the fan was.
Is there anything we didn’t like?
At its higher speeds, the Shark ChillPill is very loud. Recording the fan at 50cm away, I measured output as low as 43.1dBA at setting 1 and as high as 65.6dBA at setting 10. From a metre away, these readings weren’t much quieter: 39dBA at setting 1 and 60dBA at setting 10.
This is pretty astonishing for a handheld fan; it’s louder than most of the full size models we’ve reviewed: the MeacoFan Sefte 10in Table Air Circulator, for instance, measured 43dBA at full blast (from 1m away), while Shark’s own Flexbreeze HydroGo didn’t exceed 50dBA. By comparison, the John Lewis Handheld fan peaked at around 48.8dBA from 1m away.
What do these measurements mean when it comes to the ChillPill’s typical usage? Well, it didn’t prove too much of a disturbance when travelling from Loughton to Woodford on the Central Line, but I was much more self conscious when using it at my desk in the much quieter Expert Reviews office. I even noticed one colleague donning his noise-cancelling headphones after I’d turned it on.
It’s also pretty expensive, and £130 is a rather steep price to pay for a fan that makes so much noise for what is, ultimately, rather underwhelming performance. This price is even more disheartening when you add the cost of replacing misting pod wicks and any other additional accessories you might want. When a handheld fan costs more than £100, is making customers pay an extra £6 for a wristlet or £18 for a sleeve strap really justified, not to mention that the drawstring bag that is included is barely big enough in the first place?
Compare all this to the John Lewis Handheld fan, which costs less than 10% of the cost of the ChillPill, and it puts things into perspective. Of course, the obvious response to this will be that the John Lewis fan doesn’t offer the features that the ChillPill does, which is a fair point. So, whether £130 is a reasonable investment depends entirely on how much use you think you’ll get out of those other attachments: the misting pod and the cooling plate. For me, with the exception of occasional cool misting, the answer is, unfortunately, not a lot. It’s also worth pointing out that you can pick up a handheld misting fan on Amazon for around £20, though I obviously can’t speak for the quality and effectiveness of these cheap fans.
Should you buy the Shark Chill Pill?
I know I’ve grumbled a lot in this review, but I really wanted to like the Shark ChillPill when I first started reviewing it. The design, build quality and feel of it are all things I love. It’s just a shame that it’s loud, expensive and that the fan is disappointingly ineffective.
I’m aware that a lot of people will disagree with my verdict. For them, the merits of the ChillPill’s attractive design and modular attachments may well outweigh the drawbacks in its performance. But when a £12 John Lewis own-brand rival is both quieter and offers more powerful air speeds, I know where I’d want to spend my money.
