On Thu, 09 Dec 2010 21:03:33 -0500, Home Guy wrote:

improperly and unnecessarily full-quoted:

With the DC blower it's only about 100 watts to run the blower
on low in my house

Look - I live in Ontario too. And I just got dumped on with 3 feet of
snow, and it's like 16 to 24 F around here lately.

London area? You poor guys - Waterloo Region dodged the bullet this
time!!!

I live in a drafty 1976-era house. I can tell you that there is no
reason to run the blower constantly in the winter. When I switch my
HVAC from summer to winter mode, the only time my blower fan comes on is
when the furnace is on. There is just no need for a constant breeze
inside your house in the winter.

Running the fan constantly in the winter, even at a low speed, is not
efficient from a heating point of view. By keeping a constant breeze,
you're helping interior heat loss by causing interior air to constantly
come into contact with your walls and windows, which are the coolest
parts of the interior and from which heat is transfered out of your
house. When the fan is off and there's no air circulation, a
temperature gradient will set up in the air near the surface of the
walls and that air will be cold but you won't get as much heat loss
through this gradient as you would if the air was constantly mixing.

You can say what you like. I heat my 1970's (1974?) 2 storey for $700
a year in Waterloo with natural gas.

In the summer (late may to maybe late september) yes my fan is on quite
a bit, and even if I had a low-speed option I would not use it - I would
still be using the normal hi-speed mode for circulation and comfort.

Only use the AC on the really nasty hot/humid days. This last summer
that was about 2 weeks

And I still say that having the ability to draw return air totally from
a dedicated outside duct in the summer and force the normal return air
out of the house through another duct is more energy-efficient at
cooling your house vs using an AC during those times when the outside
air temp is lower than the current inside air temp, which frequently
happens in the late afternoon and evening in the spring and late summer.