Quite a while back, I had replaced the 3 speed control with a 50 ohm rheostat which worked extremely well as an infinitely variable speed controller.
Finally got around to try replacing the 50 ohm rheostat with a 16khz PWM dc controller from AMZ. I added an illuminated power off switch to prevent the PWM vampire battery drain when not in use.
This PWM controller is almost as quiet as the rheostat at the lowest speed and hopefully it will deliver on battery saving.