Opinion of Attic and Whole House Fans

[rondog]

Love ours! I work nights and when I get home in morning in the summer, open some windows around the shady sides and flood the house with that cool morning air. Starts warming up, off goes the fan, windows get closed, AC gets turned on. But the AC doesn't actually come on for several hours.

[Martinjmpr]

I should add that in our previous house, which was a ranch style (1 floor) with no basement (crawl space) in Engelwood, we had ceiling fans in every room. It would get uncomfortably hot almost every day in the Summer. We eventually put a window AC unit in our bedroom so we could sleep and I put one in my office as well for the days I worked from home, but our West facing living room was always over 80 degrees in mid Summer no matter how many ceiling fans we ran.

Put more simply, I don't think ceiling fans can hold a candle to an attic fan in terms of their ability to quickly cool down a house. In our current house (with the whole house fan) even before we put in the AC, if we ran the whole house fan in the evening, we ended up manually turning it off by midnight because it got too cold in the house.

The bottom line is that IMO a whole house/attic fan is a great addition to central AC in a multi-story house.

[Jimmy]

Our 1993 home, when we purchased in 2006, only had a whole house fan. A year later, we installed AC for those times when the temps don't get cool enough soon enough after sundown to cool the house for comfortable sleeping. Like someone else mentioned, we find that we get by without the AC for some time in the spring. For us, the house reaching the low 80s and it's still not cool enough outside to turn on the whole house fan usually marks the start of AC season.

[VDW]

If you have allergies, an attic fan is useless. For those of us with older houses/HVAC systems, I highly recommend an in-room AC unit like Costco carries...especially if your bedroom is upstairs. Works wonders, even if you have AC, but not individual room thermostats.

[brutal]

I should have added to my first post that when it was really hot and I needed an extra bump, I would turn on the sprinklers in the back with the patio door open and make it into one giant swamp cooler.

Yea water bill + elec bill...

[Justin]

I had an attic fan installed in my house a few years ago, and have been very pleased with it. Even on a very warm day, if I open the basement windows, it does a good job of pulling the cool air up from the basement and dropping the temperature of the house noticeably.

[colorider]

Forgot to mention, it also drags in every outdoor smell. Skunks, backyard camp fires, bbq, etc. my neighborhood loves to have fires on the patios. A whole house fan makes the house smell like you are camping. In the fire.

[kidicarus13]

Forgot to mention, it also drags in every outdoor smell. Skunks, backyard camp fires, bbq, etc. my neighborhood loves to have fires on the patios. A whole house fan makes the house smell like you are camping. In the fire.

Something I did not consider. Neighbor two doors down has a fire going 85% of the time time in the evenings.

[Irving]

Something I did not consider. Neighbor two doors down has a fire going 85% of the time time in the evenings.

Not safe for work.

https://youtu.be/pG4A8v-QHFA

[SideShow Bob]

I use a Hillbilly whole house fan. In the early morning when I get up. I put a box fan blowing out in a upstairs window on the west side and half open a couple of windows on the first floor north side. Run the the box fan on high until I go to work. This sucks in the cooler north side air and exhausts it up and out cooling the house down. At night I close the first floor windows and open the bedroom windows about 1/4 of the way and turn the fan to low still blowing out.
Keeps me from using the air conditioning for a few more weeks until it is just too hot outside.