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Ah, the whole house fan. I grew up in an area with 90-100 degree days/50 degree nights without AC, and my parents eventually got a whole house fan. We had it
by sbov 15y ago
Ah, the whole house fan. I grew up in an area with 90-100 degree days/50 degree nights without AC, and my parents eventually got a whole house fan.
We had it installed in the ceiling in our hallway in a 4 bedroom house. I didn't care for it for a couple reasons:
It was dusty around where we lived. This means it was really good at sucking said dust into the house. Made everything get dirty faster.
Even when it was on at night, it didn't really seem to cool off the house much. Sure, if you sat in the wind path of your open windows, it was 50 degrees. If you weren't, it was still pretty warm. I'm sure it was really good at cooling our attic off though.
Part of me wonders if the fan was too large for the house to be effective.
- algoshift 15y agoWell, I am not doing an off the shelf whole house fan. Clearly some of the issues you mentioned are very real. Dust can be easily handled with filtering. My summer long experiment proved that you can cool a house and avoid using the AC unit for a whole summer. This is at least true where I live. The next step is to come up with a plan for next year. Since a fan outside the downstairs kitchen window worked just fine, I don't have to rush to put in a commercial system. I can use all of next summer to experiment and find a better solution. You can cool my house during the summer for about $10 per month. That's the baseline from which I'll judge all other solutions.