This seems so simple, can’t believe I need to ask:
The bedrooms are at one end of the house and the A/C unit is in the attic above them; they get rather cool during the day. The living room/dining room/kitchen is at the other end down a ten foot hallway. I’ve messed about with opening/closing vents, and thought about using a box fan to draw some cool into the not-cool. Should the fan go at the bedroom end to “push” the air down the hall, or at the LR end to “suck” the air up the hall? Experimentation is not helping much–which is more scientific?
Fans are only good for “pulling” air if their sides are sealed. In an open air environment, a box fan will pull much of its “input” air from the front.
Sorry if I don’t understand, but fans in a house are not working in an “open air environment”–right?
This isn’t science, but I have two window AC units in the front and back of one half of my house. Neither is really strong enough to cool the entire open plan area. But a fan blowing from the front (cooler at the hottest part of the day) towards the back seems to keep the whole house cooler than no fan at all.
It is more efficient to blow hot air away than to “push” cold air in. Whether it’s better to blow the hot air outside the window or into the cooler area house will depend on a number of factors, but if it were me, I would set up two fans at opposite ends of the house to get a nice circulation going. Set the fan in the hot room as close to the ceiling as possible and set the fan in the cold room close to the ground.
The main question in the fan blowing hot air or cold, apart from maximising reach along the corridor, is whether you are helping convection or not.
If you push cold air to the bottom of a hot room, it just stays there at the bottom, and you are not getting the benefit of convection.
If you push hot air from the LR to the bottom of the cold bedrooms , the hot air goes up to the attic, and therefore cold air comes down, conveying the absence of heat down to where you want the absence of heat…
Basically, what is BEST is to disturb the layers (top to bottom) and aid convection…