Month: May 2014

IP address reservation on XFINITY / Comcast Routers

Why reserve an IP address?

The AirScape control board gets its IP address from your router through a process called DHCP.  When your router senses that a new device is connected, it assigns an IP address to that device.

A DHCP assigned IP address can and will change over time, but we want a fixed address for our AirScape whole house fan.  With an IP reservation, the router will recognize the fan by its MAC address and then assign it the same IP address each time.  This way, when you use the web browser interface to control your whole house fan you type in the same IP address each time.

Previous blog entry on Dlink router IP reservations.

The video below gives you a brief overview on reserving an IP address on the current (2014) line of XFINITY and Comcast routers:

WHF Discharge into Attics

We occasionally get questions from potential customers about ducting a whole house fan directly outside, instead of having it discharge into the attic.  Have a look at the graph below from our San Jose DMP demo site to illustrate why we recommend discharging into the attic space.

At the end of a hot day, the attic space is around 95 deg F (RED line).  When the whole house fan is started (GRAY line spike to speed 6), the attic temp drops over 10 deg F in just a few minutes.  What you are looking at is the flushing effect of the whole house fan pushing all that hot attic air outside.  Without that flushing effect, the house would continue to have additional heat load from the attic.  This is an additional (bonus) effect on top of the cool outside air being pulled into your living space!

More info on DMP and Demo Page

attic temp

DMP Additions and Changes

You asked, we listened. The Data Monitoring Package (DMP) now has 2 new features:

1. The graphs on the DMP page now display the fan speed in addition to the outdoor, attic and space temperatures.
graphs

 

2. You can now download the historical whole house fan data to your computer by clicking the DOWNLOAD icon under the temperature graphics. The data is downloaded in “CSV” format which can easily be imported into Excel or other spreadsheet programs.

downloading_data