How It Works

How A Whole House Fan Actually Works

A whole house fan is a cooling system that draws in fresh cool outdoor air in through your home and transfers warm stale indoor air out through the attic. This replaces the air in your home every 5-10 minutes, making it a healthier living environment.

A whole house fan can change the temperature of your home within a matter of minutes depending on the time and day or the climate you live in. More specifically, a whole house fan can make your home cooler all throughout the late evenings and greatly reducing the usage of air conditioning systems.

How It Works

  1. Open a few windows any time it’s cooler outside than inside, typically in the morning and evening.
  2. Turn your QuietCool fan on by setting the speed and timer.
  3. QuietCool pulls in cool, fresh air from outside and expels hot, stale air out attic vents.
  4. Your home has now been made cooler, healthier, and more comfortable.

When is a Good time to run a Whole House Fan?

The golden time to run a whole house fans would be is when the outside temperature is cooler than the inside temperature of your home. Have you ever come home from a busy work day or a short vacation and opened the front door of your home only to be greeted by a hot slap to the face? Well throughout the day your home absorbs the heat from the sun and stores that heat in your walls or any furniture you might own we call this thermal mass. Anything and everything the sun touches can store heat. One way that works extremely well for a home that has built up heat is to cool it with a whole house fan. A whole house fan can exhaust the heat from a home, this is also known as thermal mass cooling, creating a cooler and livable environment. So, a good time to use a whole house fan is when the outside temperature is cooler or when it feels stuffy inside your home.

The perfect example for how thermal mass cooling works

The inside of your car has built up and stored a lot of heat during a hot day. Your first initial reaction is to roll the windows down to let the hot stale air out. Once the majority of the hot air gets exhausted out of the car you immediately turn the air conditioning on to cool the rest of your car. This is similar to what a whole house fan can do for your home and is also known as thermal mass cooling.

The Technical Side of Whole House Fans

A QuietCool whole house fan, when sized correctly, can fully exchange the entire volume of air within a home 15-20 times every hour. This means in every 3 to 4 minutes, the air in your home is getting replaced with new fresh air. This constant active breeze is why QuietCool whole house fan systems are the leading brand in whole house ventilation.

This also goes hand in hand with thermal mass cooling, because QuietCool fan systems are cycling cooler air and exhausting hot stale air at the rate 15 to 20 times an hour.

The Benefits of a Thermal Mass Cooled Home

A home that is thermal mass cooled can have a few benefits to a homeowner. One major benefit is lowering the amount of strain your air conditioning unit will have to go through trying to cool down an entire home. Another benefit would be the comfort level inside the home not being so stuffy and unbearably hot. The last benefit would be impacting the amount you spend on trying to keep your home cool throughout the day. Having a whole house fan installed can not only keep the thermal mass of your home cool, but it can also be cost-effective in time.