"Nate Nagel" wrote in message
...
Hi all,

well, it's finally summer here in DC. Yay. House has no A/C.
Yeah, I know, but I loved the place and there's lots of trees for
shade. Here's the problem; it gets up over 90 degrees outside
during the day. With the windows closed and blinds drawn it gets up
to about 80 in the upstairs (rest of house is comfortable when I get
home from work.) As soon as the outside temp drops below the inside
temp, I will open all the upstairs windows and turn on the cheap
floor fan that the PO's left for me to try to blow some outside air
through the house. It doesn't seem to be working - outside temp
will drop to 65 degrees or cooler overnight but the bedroom will
still be 75 degrees or so when I wake up in the morning. I suspect
if I could get the ambient temp. of the upstairs down to the same
temp as the outside and then shut everything up when I left for
work, it wouldn't even be as hot when I got home, but I seem to be
getting little or no cooling from having the windows open.

To those of you who also persist in living without A/C, what's the
best way to deal with this - get a bunch of window mount fans to try
to set up an artificial cross breeze, or would installing ceiling
fans provide enough circulation? (the girlie wants to do the latter
anyway, and the only reason I haven't done it yet is because I still
need to get up in the attic and install the heavier boxes and drop
some 14/3 switch legs to the wall boxes.)

I've also thought about tricking the furnace fan into running to
circulate cool air up from the basement, but I haven't really dug
into it that much yet. Would that be a worthwhile modification?


I set up a "gable vent fan" in the attic access hole (exhausting) with
a X10 appliance module to turn if on and off. I open a window upstairs
and a window downstairs when I want to use the fan. It's sort of a
"poor mans" whole house fan. The fan had four mounting "arms" on it. I
sliped foam pipe insulation over each arm and place it in the access
hole to the attic. The foam de-couples the vibration to reduce noise.
It really makes a difference here in Seattle, It won;t do so well in
DC, but better than just a fan.

Bob