Adventures in Ventilatory Home Cooling

If you really want to go hard core, how about Heat Recovery Ventilation?

[ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_recovery_ventilation]Heat recovery ventilation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]
DIY ventilation heat exchanger - EcoRenovator

Any home is going to need fresh air, especially if there are any combustion sources in the house. Using countercurrent air to air heat exchangers, you make sure that in the summer, the fresh air that comes into the house dumps its heat into the stale air going out of the house, resulting in less heat infiltration into the house when you're trying to stay cool. Conversely, in the winter, the stale air going out dumps its heat into the fresh air coming into the house that you're trying to keep warm.

 

Bury the tiles outside at night, about 6 feet deep. Then, when the house is hot, go out and bring in the tiles, which will have cooled to below air temperature. Once the tiles have warmed up to ambient air temperature in the house, bring them back outside and bury them again.

Repeat.

 

If you fabricate something that couples the fans to the windows and doesn't allow any fan airflow to not go through the window, they will be much more effective. If you have horizontally sliding windows you might be able to make a panel that surrounds the fan and slips into the open window's track. That would make it easy to install and remove.

 

I was thinking of using something like this,

Lasko Weather Shield 20 in. 3-Speed Box Fan - 3755 at The Home Depot

or their model without a thermostat which is $5 cheaper. It would be easy to mount to a flat panel that dropped into the window track.

A nicer option that would take more work would be to mount it so the window could be closed without taking the fan down.

 

I'm in Colorado, last summer we installed an AirScape whole house fan. It is a smaller, quieter and low energy consuming fan. We got the 1.7 model. I turn it on in the evening when the outside temp gets below inside on high and switch it to low when we go to bed.

I does a great job. The secret is that it not only removes the heat from the air, it removes the heat from the structure, so in the morning we usually end up around 65 - 65 indoor temp.

It' wasn't cheap, but I would do it again in a heatbeat.

 

Sage I always wondered if you lived in another country (since you say "petrol" a lot). My father always used to set up a whole house fan, blowing air out from my room, to pull cool air in at night. My sons house in NJ (apparently built before air cond) has a big house fan in the attic. When you turn it on, then a big panel opens up in the ceiling of the hall to let the air get up there. They don't use it. Never saw that before.

 

When I met my wife she was driving a 6 volt VW in central NYS, nights she would drain the oil and put the 6 quart pot on the wood stove overnight, in the morning she would pour it back into the VW, I really enjoyed learning that particular trick:heh:, unbelievably, the car lived for several years, ran great, eventually she sold it and I winced.

 

Fans are extremely sensitive to pressure. A conventional fan will move very little air through any type of duct work. That's why ac and heater blowers don't look like conventional fans.

Not to keep harping on the same solution but fans in your upstairs windows blowing out would do a much better job of accomplishing moving air in that direction.

 

Do you have any CO sources? Neg pressure in the house tends to pull CO back into the house.

 

It makes more sense to me to bring in cooler air at the bottom of the house, and let the warmer air flow out the top. What you need is an outside air intake on the furnace. As long as the intake point is in a shaded area, the incoming air should be relatively cool. At night, you can let the furnace fan run on low speed, and the warm air will be replaced by cooler air as you sleep. For a low-tech but effective air conditioning system, burying an air supply tube in the yard will give you cooled air all day long, whatever the ambient temperature.

 

We don't use AC, but we do use a whole house fan on the rare occasions when needed. Actually, we have three whole house fans, which kind of defeats the concept of "whole house". I suppose they weren't thinking of a building this size when the term was coined.

Tom

 

While a fan doesn't work well to move air in ducting, it will move air fairly well if placed against an open window to either blow air out, or blow air in.

You can set up a fan downstairs to blow air in, while setting up another fan upstairs to blow air out. If you strategically place the fans so the air must move across the entire downstairs and upstairs in a meandering fashion before exiting, it will help.

Secondly, what you want is to mix the hot air that is trapped in the ceiling with the cold air that hugs the floor. You can easily set up a fan to blow cold air upwards. It will cause the air to mix instead of stratifying into layers.


If you could get a blower and ducting to work, it would be ideal to blow in cold air from the lowest point of your property to the very top of the house. Like filling a bottle with water, the air will flow downwards until your house is filled. It will try to displace any hot air that is below the duct's output. You need to have one window open in the opposite side of the house to let hot air escape due to the positive pressure.

Finally, since you don't have an attic, you can get a sunroof that opens. They are relatively inexpensive and you can even have some set on a timer and also have weather sensitive ones that automatically close during wet weather.

Anyways, experimenting with a couple $12 box fans from Walmart is worthwhile.

 

I hate you more :nod: