AirScape Engineer's Blog

As I was walking up a very steep hill this morning, I devoted my remaining oxygen to calculating my energy output. Once fully oxygenated, I rechecked the numbers and came out with a work output of 168 watts.  This figure is just the energy to lift me up the 170 foot rise over 2 city blocks (10 % average slope as it turns out).

Me walking uphill

So how does this relate to energy, and its inherent value ?  If I worked at that energy output rate for 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year, for 5 years, I would have produced 1,747 kWh.  As it turns out, a barrel of oil contains about 1,700 kWh of energy (if transformed at 100% efficiency).

Reference: Barrel of oil equivalent

We’re testing and finalizing details on the new AirScape roof mounted whole house fan. This model will mount directly on the roof. It’s intended for houses without attics. Here are some of the features:

• Electrically actuated, insulated, sealed door
• Ultra efficient ECM motor
• Sound levels at or below other AirScape models

More information to follow…

How much do ‘eco improvements’ such as whole house fans add to the value of your real estate? With a little bit of math, and some financial formulas, we can figure that out. Here is an example of a homeowner who installs one of our 4.4e WHF models. Let’s take a conservative value for energy savings ($500 per year), with a desired return on investment of 8% (you could not get that anywhere else..). What we do is use the financial formulas to figure how much money would need to be invested at 8% interest in order to return $500 per year, over the life of the whole house fan. At the end of the 20 year life span, we assume (also conservatively), that the WHF has no remaining  value.

Plugging in the numbers: i = 0.08; n = 20; Savings per Year = $500, yields Present Value = $4909.

Wow! That means that if you paid up to $4,909 the return on investment would be 8%. (we don’t charge that much for the 4.4e…)

Saving Energy is a damned good investment. Who woulda thunk ?

We just discovered that the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power offers a $200 rebate for installing a Whole House Fan. Check out the details by clicking here.

Not in the LA area? Many other municipalities and utilities offer WHF rebates. Take a look at our blog covering the full list of rebates we have found so far:

http://blog.airscapefans.com/archives/new-whf-rebates