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It should be alright sir. It will be far to hot to touch though.

heat also kills the components on the board.. It is advised you run a fan on the thing if you want it to even get close to its ROI.
(source: I have 1 block erupter.. and it is far happier with a fan on it)

That's the theory. But I don't have fan running on my USB Block Erupter. I have been using computers and lots of electronic devices in my house. I don't really bother to switch a lot of them off, because I don't need to pay the electricity. It is covered in my rent. And my game consoles are on 24/7 for many years. also my laptops and computers (Non of them have die because I don't put extra cooling for them). Some people have extra fans to cool them down. And for custom pc some people even use water cooling for their pc. I know an office which run it's server for 24/7 for over 20 years, and they are not putting extra cooling for it or even put inside an Air Conditioning server room.

So in practice, I don't think you really need a fan for your USB Block Erupter.

They're OK if they're in open air, or even somewhere with a bit of air movement.  Mine are in a 10 port hub that's sitting beside the ATX PSU running my Blades.  The tiny bit of air movement from the fan in the PSU is enough to keep the temps down on the Erupters.

You don't need a fan for one Erupter.

The cooling block on top of the board is good enough.

You'd only need a fan if you're running several of them close together, such as ten in one USB hub, because the multiple heat sources close together cause a higher aggregate temperature.

While you CAN run it without a fan doesn't mean you SHOULDN'T, USB fans are dirt cheap and it's pretty easy to make your own from old leftover case fans and old USB cords. I'd like my hardware to last as long as it can.

You ought to do it properly.

http://s13.postimg.org/h01eh3vqv/IMG_20130821_140227.jpg

I have been running mine without since I bought it for 2.6 BTC; chew on that non-ROI, so far it has generated 0.3! ;)

But I have proper heat sinks (not the flat one shipped) on both sides.

I'm trying to buy one BF1 USB so I can run that passively too.

The circuit board on the BE is discoloring around the BE100 chip, but so far so good (~3 months)

I'm running 12 block erupters with 2 fans. Each fan blows on 6 block erupters. They stay cool to the touch and honestly will probably last a lot longer than block erupters without any form of fan/cooling.

I honestly wouldn't worry about it.  A fan is probably going to use more power than 1 USB stick.  I wouldn't bother using a fan until you had 10 or more.  But if you're just doing this just for a kick and like gadgets, those little white Arctic Breeze (link) (http://www.amazon.com/ARCTIC-USB-Powered-Portable-Cooling-Solution/dp/B003XN24GY/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1379832770&sr=1-1&keywords=USB+arctic+fan) fans are irresistible... and cheap.

I have my hub full of Erupters sitting on a bench with no direct sunlight and the board edges touching the tiles on the wall - No idea if the ceramic is helping but the minute my new oscillators arrive - they will have fans on them and beter heatsinks

According to the Arrhenius equation, the increase in failure rate is related exponentially to the increase in temperature
http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/apr/section1/apr151.htm (http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/apr/section1/apr151.htm)
so cooling your BE or any other electronic devices is expected to improve their reliability.

Stay cool :)

Nice tip, I ordered one from amazon... so simple; a USB fan with variable speed, wonder why this is so rare!

Perfect for the BE and BF1, thx!

there's also an "ARCTIC COOLING BREEZE Pro" 92mm, with variable speed and 4 usb ports. It's usb-powered though, so those 4 ports will probably only accept low-power devices, and no block erupter.
It can be found at 12 EUR per unit in public and online stores here.

I'll probably look into this one, cause i'm actually using a way too big fan to cool my 5 block erupters, wasting energy.
(i for sure won't go fanless with block erupters, they really gets way too hot in a few minutes, if no fan is used).

http://www.watercoolinguk.co.uk/images/product_images/large/ACO-AC-BREEZE-PRO.jpg

Those look pretty cool nice! Purhaps running that off a mains power usb charger and hooking your Pi to it?

Im running almost 40 without fan.. they are costing 0.17 BTC/each, are easy to change if one get burned and i don't want to keep it 10 years up and running.. I prefer to save watts, hub port and to keep everything in silence.. They are hot, but I don't touch them with my tong... so who cares

I hope ours will last long enough to get ROI.
Rough estimations indicates around 3 months to roi according to the currency you're mining.

How long have you been running erupters without fan ?

i just turned on a ventilator, in the high summer, middle august. so since april i think. like there is some airflow, the air temperature now is around 14 degrees, but no fan and no reported error (actually less than 1% or something like that) on bfgminer and i never had a problem.. ROI is hard to calculate, specially if you think on the price when it came into the market, but for sure they are headache zero and silent.  I prefer a 10GHs from erupter than the asic blaster (I have one, and I always think that it will burn my house down, that sometimes I have to reboot, etc)

1 USB Miner no nee fan cooling.

I am running 21  with several dlink dUb-h7's and an aitech 10 port usb3 hub and 6 of those $5 ebay fans. not the ones on a long flexible snake, but the ones the look like a mini version of a desk fan. these are a lot less noisy than those fans on a stick

No cooling required. When you have more you can get cooler

Those things don't need fans, that you can't handle 60 degrees is fan fucking tastic but those devices don't give a fuck, those fans cost a fortune and kill the ROI you would otherwise also never have.

Shouldn't be to hot to do damage

I would recommend to use a fan but i have had some running without a fan without any problems although i get a lot of HW errors :/

i have a fan, and get HW errors at the wazoo.  doesn't affect the bit rate  ;D