We love houses, and so do our friends at Redfin – the very cool and informative real estate website. They just published this article , which has some great tips on keeping your house cool this summer.
Keeping you cool, while saving energy – that’s a core part of our business, so we’re happy to see our tip mentioned. And what do you know ? We suggested whole house fans.
What is the difference between a Whole House Fan and an Attic Ventilator? First of all the Whole House Fan is mounted in the attic, while an Attic Ventilator is mounted on the roof or the gable wall of an attic.
The Whole House Fan pulls in cool outside air when you open the windows at night and exhausts the stale, hot air out. It is a natural source of fresh air that saves energy. Because a WHF operates between 2000 CFM and 6000 CFM they quickly exhaust hot indoor air and bring in the cool outside air.
An Attic Ventilator’s purpose is to get hot air out of your attic and bring cool air in. However, it can be pulling that cool air from your house. The fan can depressurize the attic by exhausting air from it, as well. Replacement air comes in either from the outside intake vents or from openings/cracks into the house. The main reason to cool an attic is if you store things in it or have ductwork or HVAC equipment up there. If this is the case, your HVAC equipment and ductwork would better serve you in the interior of your home somewhere, or the insulation should be moved from the attic floor to the sloped roofing of your house.
As you can see the Whole House Fan is designed to cool your home and save you energy while the Attic Ventilator, while good in theory, can actually pull cool air from your home and in turn cost you more in energy.
As you may have heard, we are currently running a promotion offering rebates to customers who send us a video of themselves installing or operating their fan. You can read more about that promotion here, but you should also check out this video that was recently submitted by one of our customers—we’re really excited to share it because it was so well done.
And the video wasn’t the only thing well done. We often field questions as to how our fans’ dampers can be installed in a vertical orientation, or how to organize the installation in an attic with low clearance. This customer did a great job of both. Also, you’ll notice that this customer used many of our fans’ available accessories: the Openable, Washable Grille; an Acoustic Plenum; Wireless Remote; SafeSpeed Kit; and our Data Monitoring Package.
While we can’t identify them here, we’d like to thank our customer for sending us that great video. We’re looking forward to sharing more as the promotion continues.
Note: 2015 Rebate ended.
When we’re designing our whole house fans, we here at AirScape endeavor to make them as easy as possible to install. Over the years, this effort has led us to create damper boxes that fit easily on 16″ or 24″ on-center framing, “plug & play” controls that use low-voltage CAT-5 wiring, and a new latching mechanism for attaching ductwork to our new 5.0e. Our goal is simple: we want do-it-yourselfers to feel confident in installing AirScape fans themselves.
We often hear back from customers once they’ve finished installing their fans. Customers with unique installations often want to share their experience, and many customers simply want to share their pride in their own installation and excitement about our fans. We loving hearing back and getting feedback (both good and bad) from our customers. We’d love our customers to share more—we’d even like to offer a rebate to those who do.
Exciting news! AirScape has been mentioned in the July, 2015 issue of Sunset Magazine.
Matt Golden, an efficiency expert, provided some tips to help readers efficiently keep their homes cool through the summer. In addition to sealing HVAC ducts, properly insulating the home, and drawing the blinds during the day, Matt recommended homeowners invest in a whole house fan—a suggestion we obviously agree strongly with, especially when ours is the brand being recommended.
Sunset’s July, 2015 issue is on newsstands now. It’d be ungrateful for us not to suggest you go out and get a copy, so, if you’re not already a subscriber, please do! We’re a little too excited, however, not to provide a link, so you can also check out our brief appearance here.
Also, Matt is the CEO of a very cool start-up, Open Energy Efficiency. Be sure to check out their website as well!
Our newest model of whole house fan, the 5.0e, is has been available on our website since spring. We’re extremely excited about it. Not only is this our first new fan in several years, but it is also our most powerful and our most efficient fan ever. Moreover, we’re manufacturing a greater portion of this fan “in-house” at our Medford, Oregon facility than any of our other fans. We’re also seeking a patent for some of the innovations behind its performance. As our patent is finally “pending”, we can now share the story of the 5.0e’s development.