It's this one:
This infant can churn out somewhere amongst 6,000 and seven,000 cubic ft of air consistent with minute (CFM). We occasionally use it in the nighttime or early morning to help relax our non-centrally-air-conditioned residence via placing it up in a window, blowing outward. Then we open up a group of domestic home windows to allow in cooler outdoor air, replacing what the fan blows out.
However, this makeshift machine isn't always all that inexperienced. While the large fan can push out a big quantity of air, we do not without a doubt have a window to area it in wherein it may create a draft thru the complete residence. The huge fan additionally uses a honest quantity of power?Among one hundred and one hundred 80 watts on high speed, spiking as a whole lot as 270 at the same time as it is first grew to end up on. And it's far loud sufficient to make verbal exchange tough, if not not possible.
So lately we've been toying with the concept of having an entire-house fan installed. If we placed it right smack in the center of the hallway, it might pull air via each a part of the house. And at a few stage in the beyond couple of weeks, at the same time as temperatures every now and then spiked over ninety in the course of the daylight hours after which dropped into the 60s at night time time, we had a colourful demonstration of the manner beneficial it would be a good way to update all of the warm air in our residence with outdoor air as soon as we get up inside the morning.
Never having set up considered one of this stuff in advance than, we did not have an splendid idea how a whole lot it'd charge. A net site referred to as Homewyse gave me a hard estimate of amongst $450 and $650, which incorporates hard work; this article on HouseLogic grow to be much less positive, announcing we may additionally want to anticipate to pay among $one hundred and fifty and $550 for the gadget and $1,000 or so for installation. So, to get a greater concrete idea of the manner a great deal this will price and whether it changed into likely to be well worth the money, we determined ultimate week to get quotes for the challenge from several neighborhood electricians.
Well, that changed into the idea, at least. In fact, two of the four electricians I contacted in no way got once more to me in any respect; a 3rd one e-mailed me with a couple of questions on our setup, after which in no manner spoke back to my respond. The fourth one, via evaluation, answered very right away, calling me inside mins after my initial email to installation an appointment. However, they couldn't decide to a particular time, announcing handiest that a person would be there
The electrician finally showed up around 3pm, and the first thing he did was try to convince me that we need to upgrade our old panel box (which may be true) because "it really should be done every seven years" (which definitely isn't). Then, after spending the next 45 minutes checking this and that and trekking back and forth to his van, he finally presented me with a quote of around $2,275. Yep, more than $700 above the highest estimate we'd seen anywhere else. And this, mind you, was for a fan with a maximum output of 1,000 CFM; most sources recommend at least 1,500 CFM for a house the size of ours. And on top of that, the electrician told us we'd need not one, but two circuits dedicated entirely to the fan; he actually complained at first about the fact that we only had two free circuits with nothing on them, saying that a fan large enough for our house might need four. Four?! We know that a single circuit in our house can run our refrigerator (with the compressor on) and our microwave at the same time; that's at least 1,500 watts. Is the fan he proposes to install really going to draw four times as much power as that? If so, how can it possibly be more efficient than air conditioning?
So it might have seemed like that was the end of that idea. However, while researching whole-house fans in general, I'd happened upon the website of a company that makes what it describes as "Quiet Cool House Fans." According to their FAQ, these have two main advantages over a conventional whole-house fan. First, they're easier to install. They're narrow enough to fit between floor joists, so you just cut through the ceiling between to insert the grill, and the fan itself hangs suspended from the attic rafters. All you need is a standard 120-volt outlet in the attic to plug it in. And second, they're quieter. Because the fan assembly hangs from the rafters instead of being mounted right in the ceiling, it can push through the same amount of air without creating as much noise in the living space below.
These fans aren't cheap. The 2,250-CFM fan, which is the minimum size they recommend for a house the size of ours, costs $650 and uses 249 watts; the more efficient Energy Saver version, with an output of 2,850 CFM, costs $969 and uses 178 watts. But that's still less than half the price we were quoted to have a less powerful, less efficient, and louder fan installed. Of course, we also need to factor in the cost of getting an outlet added in the attic. Kudzu estimates the cost of that job at about $100; Homewyse puts it between $150 and $220. And if our town requires a permit (and it usually does), that could add another $50 or so.
So the questions now are:
- How much of this job can we actually do ourselves; and
- Is this fan going to be so much quieter and/or more effective than our current jury-rigged system as to make it worth between $850 and $1,170 to install?
