My old house doesn’t have central heat and air. In the Summer, if it’s not too hot, I don’t run the one window air conditioner during the day while I’m gone. Often by the time I get home from work it’s cooler outside than it is inside. I do leave attic windows open for ventilation, and I open then house windows. But the cool air is slow to come in.
Is it better to put a window fan in pulling the cool air in, or to pull the hot air out and opening the other windows to let it pull the draft through?
My family used a window fan to pull air out. Open another window in the same room to allow cross ventilation. You’ll feel a nice breeze coming in that open window.
It worked quite well in my uncle’s dining room. We were comfortable at the table.
You will have to take the screens off in the Fall to wash them. We used a broom and a water hose out in the yard. Amazing how much dirt they catch.
I have an attic fan in my house. I can open windows in several rooms and get a nice breeze. I use it a lot in early Spring and late summer. I installed a timer switch on mine because I was waking up cold late at night. I’ll set the fan to run for a couple hours after I go to bed.
I use an exhaust fan in a rear bedroom and then open up the rooms I want fresh air to flow into from outside. I just don’t like the noise of a fan or the feeling of the air blowing.
you have air flow due to wind direction and convection, you don’t want to fight either of them. also air flows easier into low pressure than pushed out by high pressure.
if you have a multi-story house then have window fans blow out the upper floor windows. have lots of lower windows open. have few or none top floor windows open, this will depend on how you are using your rooms.
place the fans blowing out on the side of the house opposite that the wind is blowing from.
If you can put in a whole-house fan, they’re great. You just need a roughly square-yard piece of clear ceiling space in the upstairs hallway to hold the fan and you’ll probably need to upgrade the roof/attic ventilation to accomodate the airflow.
I figure that since heat rises, I’d want to suck the hot air out of the upper stories and leave windows open on the lower stories. You’d want to take into account the usual wind direction also.
Right now I don’t have an attic fan (although in retrospect, I should’ve had one put in this winter when I put the new roof on) and at this point one of the big ones would probably draw more power than I can spare. Hopefully the electrical upgrade will be next year or the year after. Then central heat and air.
So what I have now is a window fan that can reverse. I’d prefer not to have it in a front window, but those face south and don’t get a lot of breeze anyway. If I put it in a back window at the other side of the house, would it draw air through the house?
For exactly that reason I use the fan to blow air out instead of in, it keeps that screen from getting filthy. Also, I once or twice wound up with a small swarm of gnats in the house. Blowing air out against a screen doesn’t get the screen dirty at all that I’ve noticed in all the years I’ve been doing it.
Pulling air in with a fan will get the screen dirty in just a few months.
I’m not sure how well this answers your question, but I have a smallish 650sq foot apartment on the 4th floor. It gets stuffy and warmer than outside in there, even on cool (under 70F) days. Very sunny place. I’ve bought two window reversible window fans (these). One in the living room blowing in, one in the bedroom, same side of the building, blowing out. Breezes tend to come from the opposite side of the building where the kitchen is, across from the living room. The out-blowing fan from the bedroom seems to pull the breeze through the rest of the apartment from the fan that blows in and the kitchen window that allows free breeze. Hope that’s not confusing.
Doing it this way, I can feel the heat change as I travel up the stairs, with it of course being hottest from the last landing to mine. It can be oppressive feeling, and my apartment would feel the same unless I did that fan configuration. As it is, I open my front door to a much cooler apartment than the stairwell.
Not only do they rapidly replace all of your hot interior air with cooler outdoor air, they replace the really hot attic air also. Install it with a timer switch rated for fans. Open the windows and hit the switch for the amount of time you want the fan to run.
Added use: Something in the kitchen stink up the whole house? Burn popcorn in the microwave? These fans make it easy and quick to simply replace the air.
attic vent fans ventilate the attic. whole house fans ventilate the house.
where you live (your climate) and the nature (construction and design) of your house can dictate what is best.
attics being well ventilated can lower summer cooling load. it also minimizes melting of snow which can cause water damage if ice dams are created. passive ventilation is good because it doesn’t break like a motorized fan and there is a lot of ventilation.
a whole house fan does put house moisture into an attic which is not a good thing. it is also a heat loss point in winter.
two window box fans can have the same amount of ventilation as a whole house fan without the noise.
i lived in a house with a whole house fan. i’ve lived without it longer.
When I lived in a house w/o A/C, I used to put a fan in my bedroom window that blew air in and then a fan at the other end of the house that blew air out. Worked pretty well as long as it was cool at night. I opened all the windows once it got cool, not just the two with the fans. That configuration ensured that my bedroom was the coolest, which is wanted when I was sleeping.
But a whole-house fan is the way to go. Just make sure you have enough venting in your attic so the air can escape.
At the moment we use free standing fans, since our windows are not conducive to window fans and the free standing fans can rotate to blow cool air on you. We have about one per room which we bought at thrift stores over the years. In NJ we had a 2 story house with an attic fan which worked great until we finally got central AC.
I agree it is a good way to go.
The other important thing is good insulation. We can cool the house down overnight and in the morning, and it stays pretty cool until evening except on the hottest days. But I’m in the Bay Area, you can’t do this everyplace. I remember walking out of the convention center in Philadelphia at midnight one night with the temp at 100 degrees.
I live just south of Nashville. This is my house. It was built in 1849. There is some insulation. It could use more. My current electrical service is rated for 60 amps.
I do use my window A/C unit, but when it’s 78 indoors and 66 outside, I’d like to take advantage of that. Just opening a few windows doesn’t create enough draw.
Eventually I could put either a whole-house fan or an attic fan in. The 2nd story is closed off by a door, which I crack open put I don’t like to keep it open because the cats go upstairs and crap up there in the attic.
I was looking for a good link about whole house fans, but most of the good ones are from companies that sell them. Instead, do a google image search for ‘whole house fan’ to get an idea of how they work and how they look in your hallway ceiling.
I have a small old house with no central air, just a window unit in the bedroom. I have two fans, one blowing cool air in from the shaded side and the other pulling warm air from the other side of the house, both window-mounted fans. Works very well.
When l lived in a brick house in a hot, arid climate, my house would get brutally hot from the late afternoon sun because the bricks retained all that heat. I ran a hose up on top of my roof with a sprinkler. When l got home, i would run the sprinkler on my roof for about 20 minutes. On very hot days steam would rise from the roof and bricks and my house would cool off dramatically. Neighbors thought l was weird but it really worked!
