If you’re not so sure a whole house window fan is the right choice for you, carefully consider whether you live in a climate where one can be useful frequently. If you do, you can save a lot of energy and be more comfortable than ever in your home with a whole house window fan. If you don’t, you may get occasional benefit but may not like yours as well as you’d hoped.
Whole house window fans work best you need to air out your home because of a buildup of indoor heat and humidity. When it’s hot and sticky inside your home, a whole house window fan can do an excellent job of bringing in cooler, drier air — if there is any.
You see, even the best whole house window fan can’t help you if it’s hotter and more humid outside than in your home. That means it’s a poor choice when the temperature outside your home never gets down to a reasonable level during the course of a 24-hour period.
But if you live in a place with hot days and cool, dry nights, a whole house window can make a huge difference when you run it in the evenings and early mornings to take advantage of that cool air outside. You benefit from pulling in cool, dry air and pushing out the hot, stale air. And since one of these fans costs much less to run than an HVAC system or window unit air conditioner, you save money.
That allows you to take a more minimalist approach to using whatever air conditioning system you have.
If it doesn’t get very hot in the daytime, you may not need to run anything at all during the day — or you may be able to run the AC only a few hours during the hottest part of the day instead of all day long.
When used properly and along with the right expectations, a whole house window fan can be a great addition to your home. These inexpensive and very useful appliances are the equivalent of flinging open all the doors and windows on a breezy day — except it doesn’t have to be breezy out and you don’t have to put up with flies getting in and your animals getting out.
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