Video: Advantages of a Whole House Fan

PLEASANT HILL — Host, Sarah Rutan: If you’re looking for a low-cost, energy-efficient way to cool your home, it’s worthwhile to consider the many benefits of a whole house fan. Today we’re in Pleasant Hill with Diamond Certified Expert Contributor Jeremy Carlock of Got Watts Electric to learn more.

Diamond Certified Expert Contributor, Jeremy Carlock: If you’re looking for an energy efficient way to cool your whole home, a whole house fan might be the solution for you.

This right here is a whole house fan while on low consumes 65 watts and on high 250 watts. That’s considerably less than an air-conditioning unit. The concept behind a whole house fan is the fan is mounted in the attic just like this picture here. You can see a bigger model here. This is an actual fan. It’s suspended from the roof joists so you get very minimal sound while the fan is running in your home.

Below here is what is mounted in the house. This is a register, and behind that is some dampers. When the fan is turned on, the dampers are open. When the fan is turned off, the dampers close. This creates an insulation rating between the attic space and the home so you get no dust or anything coming back down into the house.

All fans have multiple speeds. This one has a low and a high setting. On low this is 65 watts of energy consumption, and on high this would be 250 watts of energy consumption. This is considerably less than an eight to ten-thousand-watt air conditioning system. The concept behind whole house fans is that you turn the fan on. It’s centralized in the home. You open up a few windows and create a breeze through the home.

Ideally a fan would be good to use in the mornings and in the evenings, when you see a relatively cooler temperature outside. A lot of people that have air conditioning will run till nine/ten o’clock at night, not realizing that it’s actually cooler outside than it is inside their home.

Host, Sarah Rutan: To learn more from local top-rated companies, visit our Diamond Certified Expert Reports at experts.diamondcertified.org.