I Love Lucy wrote:
"Lacustral" wrote in message
...
Tamarack sells a whole house fan that is 1000 CFM. They recommend it
for up to a 2000 sq foot house, in places where summer temps get up to
95
-
which is about what happens here - it does get above 95 F sometimes
but
rarely over 100 F in the summer.

Scaling down for my 640 sq foot upper story I'd need about a third of
that
minimum, or 330 CFM.

We put in a whole house fan in the attic the 50's, and it did a good
job, especially at night with the screen windows open, created a nice
breeze. Then my mother would close the house up in the morning and open
the windows again in late afternoon. But it still got pretty hot at
times.

The main advantage to those is if there is a prolonged spell of temps
over 90, it gets all that accumulated hot air out of the house at night.

If you can't have central a/c, that is the next best thing. I have 3
commercial fans, two large and one small. They work pretty well until
it gets so hot they are just blowing the hot air around. Then I just
hide in my one air conditioned room. We can't use swamp coolers in my
area becaue it is too humid.


IMO, a lot of how useful a whole house fan can be depends on where you
live. For example, if you usually have high humidity combined with
heat, then they aren't much good. You can cool the house off at
night, but you are pulling in humid air, which is a big part of the
comfort equation that a whole house fan can't deal with.

I agree that they are useful for folks with no AC. However, I see a
lot of people that have AC considering getting a whole house fan to use
part of the time. And IMO, for most parts of the country, that
doesn't make much sense, because there are so few days of the year when
it will really work well, it's just not worth it, especially since the
amount of power it takes to run the AC those days is not huge. Plus,
you then have the problem of trying to seal it off well in the winter,
dealing with heat loss through it, etc.