A whole-house fan is home ventilation taken to the highest level. These powerful ceiling-mounted fans make your entire home the vent, inducing a strong negative pressure inside the house that draws fresh outdoor air in through open windows while exhausting stale indoor air out through attic vents. When a unit is idle, insulated louvers automatically close to prevent cooling or heating loss.
Whole-House Benefits
- While they can’t completely replace air conditioning, in climates like Baltimore with temperate nights and mornings, these major air movers keep homes comfortable all night with a wind chill effect of fresh, cool air in motion. In the morning, they may delay cranking up the A/C by several hours, as well.
- While a typical residential cooling system draws about 3,500 watts of electricity, the average 1/4- or 1/2-horsepower whole-house fan consumes only 120 to 600 watts, depending on the speed setting. For every hour you can stay comfortably cool with whole-house ventilation instead of air conditioning, you’re both saving money and conserving energy resources.
- Indoor air quality also benefits from the whole-house approach. In today’s tightly-sealed, energy efficient homes, air stagnates and indoor pollutants and humidity accumulate. The power of whole-house ventilation rapidly flushes the entire interior of the home, purging stale air and water vapor and renewing your indoor environment.
Whole-house fans are available in both direct-drive and belt-driven models. Rated by cubic feet per minute (CFM) of air movement, when properly sized, a fan should turn over the entire household air volume every two to three minutes. The general sizing formula for a residence with 8-foot ceilings is to multiply total square footage by three, and then select a whole-house fan with a CFM rating closest to that figure. Following that example, a 1,500 square foot home would require a fan rated for 4,500 CFM.
Learn more about how a whole-home fan can help your home’s level of comfort or improve its indoor air quality or call us at 888-474-3391.
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