When are the Best Times to Run a Whole House Fan?
Whole house fans are becoming increasingly popular as a replacement or supplement to traditional air conditioning that is both expensive and environmentally unfriendly. Whole house fans use significantly less electricity than air conditioning, making them the best money-saving and eco-friendly approach to cooling the home.
Furthermore, whole house fans provide benefits that air conditioners don’t. For example, whole house fans ventilate the whole home, while doesn’t. By using a whole house fan you can actively exhaust humid or polluted air, thereby reducing indoor air pollution and keeping the air in your home fresh and odor-free.
However, due to the nature of how whole house fans work — the fact that they exhaust inside air and intake fresh, outdoor air — it’s not ideal to run them at just any time of the day or night. For optimal use and to maximize the benefits of your whole house fan, you should use it at specific times.
Best Time of the Day to Run a Whole House Fan
During hot summers, the best time to run your whole house fan is in the evening and the early mornings. This is when temperatures are lowest and your whole house fan will be most effective at cooling because outdoor temperatures will have dropped.
When outdoor temperatures exceed indoor temperatures, typically around midday, you shouldn’t run the whole house fan at all because it will only increase the temperature of your home.
Your whole house fan can also be used when you want to create a breeze throughout the home. By opening the right windows you can direct the flow of air to create a cooling breeze indoors.
Cooling Your Home
One of the greatest benefits of using a whole house fan is its ability to actively cool down the structure of your home. During long stretches of high heat, the structure of your home will begin to absorb heat, increasing the temperature of your home and making cooling down via air conditioning more difficult. When this happens, your AC will work extra hard, wasting electricity, only to ineffectively cool down the home.
Whole house fans, on the other hand, ventilate air and can remove the heat from your home to cool it down. For example, during or after a heat wave (as long as nighttime temperatures are lower than daytime temperatures), your home may have absorbed a lot of heat. By running your whole house fan at night and into the morning, you can remove the heat from the structure of your home, keeping you cooler when the heat strikes again during the daytime.
Shop for our most popular whole house fans here.