If your home gets very hot and damp in the summertime but you have cool air outside in the mornings and evenings that you want to take advantage of, you need to vent the hot, humid air from your house and pull in cooler, drier air from outside.
And there are several ways to do that. Here are three that work very well:
1. Open up and use fans. The simplest, least expensive and also most labor-intensive way to ventilate your home and take advantage of cool air that nature provides outside is to open up doors and windows to create cross-ventilation, then use box fans or other large fans to help move the air. This, of course, requires to you be home, to manually open up and set up everything and then to close up when you’re done. It can create a security issue and allow indoor animals to escape while outdoor animals come in, but you don’t have to buy much to make this work.
2. Use a whole house window fan. A whole house window fan is one or more fans permanently or temporarily mounted in a window to suck out hot air and pull in cool air. When used in conjunction with another similar unit in another part of the house or an open door or window, you can get great results. These units often aren’t programmable, so you have to turn them on and off when you need them.
3. Use a programmable window ventilation system. I like the EcoBreeze, a simple unit that looks a lot like a window air conditioner. It can vent hot air and pull in cool air through the same window. And even better, it turns itself on and off and seals closed when not needed if you set in automatic mode. This type of programmable window fan is a step up from doing all the work manually or depending on a less sophisticated type or window fan.
It’s possible to take full advantage of the cool air outside your home by pulling it in. You just need to make sure you’re using the method that makes the most sense for you.
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