I am building a woodworking shop. The shop is adjacent to the house, 25' X 24' and has 12' high vaulted ceiling.
I am thinking about putting some sort of whole house fan for ventilation purposes and also to help it cool down quicker during summer time. The fan wound vent to outside trough the gable side.
Is this a good idea? I do not want to use regular whole house fan due to noise issue. I want to install some sort of inline fan directly on the gable and have duct connect it to the register in the ceiling.
Balance? Ever been in an attic on a hot day? Heat rises, warming the air closer to the ceiling or in an attic, plus heat induced from the sun hitting the roof. Air brought in from outside, even if it is a hundred plus degrees, is cooler than the air in an attic. Exhausting that hot and air pulling in _cooler_ air is a good thing.
Sounds more like an attic fan than a whole house fan. There is a difference. An attic fan mounted on a gable end will certainly help move hot air out, and bring cooler air from outside in. Increase airflow of this type is a good thing in a shop. I had an attic fan in my old shop, but removed it during renovations. Wished I still had it.
Make sure the register can be closed and sealed well (& conveniently), duri ng the winter.
ce. An attic fan mounted on a gable end will certainly help move hot air ou t, and bring cooler air from outside in. Increase airflow of this type is a good thing in a shop. I had an attic fan in my old shop, but removed it du ring renovations. Wished I still had it. --
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I presently have an attic fan at near floor level, exiting through rough fr amed double doors opening (no doors, yet), blowing out toward the south. E ventually, I'll have it at the back of the shop, again at floor level. It also helps remove dust.... not all of my work stations are serviced by the dust collector, so this partial "dust vent" works out fine.
Often, when the wind is blowing hard from the south, I put a window fan in a north facing window.
Every now and then, when the wind is right (especially from the north), I o pen up everything and blow out the shop with the leaf blower, to get rid of settled dust, and the attic fan facilitates, fast and efficiently, this cl eaning.
Any breeze through my summer-time shop definitely helps.
Thanks for all replies. So it seems a good idea. My question is what fan to choose? My primarily concern is noise. I have exhaust to outside in kitche n over the stove and it is very noisy.
Most direct drive whole house fans mount directly on register. I assume thi s is very noisy. There is QuiteCool whole house fan http://www.quietcoolfan s.net/ that seem to have fan far from the register connected to it viaduct. But they are quite expensive. I wonder if I can make similar myself by ins talling the fan on the cable and running flex duct from it to the register on the ceiling.
If you were to run a duct to your home from the gable and there is not insulation inside the duct it will pipe the sound into your home.
If you were to put in an "S" shaped duct it would trap the majority of the sound and still pull the air your wish. However, fans are designed to operate in specific ways. For instance, a fan mounted in your ceiling would have low suction pressure with a high discharge pressure so that it can pump out a lot of air (CFM) However, if that same fan were mounted in the gable the ducting would be restrictive and the fan would starve for air because the negative pressure is too great and so the fan may lose over half its capability to move air.
Look for a fan designed to work as you would like it too, the electrical cost may be more due to the amount of work required for it to "pull" rather than "push" the air.
A side benefit to installing the system as you described would be to put a relatively small opening in the duct so that it could also pull out the hot air in the attic. The reason the opening should be small is that the air opening closer to the fan is the path of least resistance, so even a three inch dia might be too big. You will have to play with that or have an engineer spec it out.
Reducing the attic temp on hot days will typically reduce the cooling load on a home by one ton in btu terms. It will keep a home substantially cooler and for those with A/C help to reduce the electrical bill and increase the effective cooling to the home.
WOW, did I misunderstand. When you duct, install an "S" duct between the fan and your shop. It will greatly reduce the sound being transmitted, and if the duct is lined with insulation will reduce the sound even more.
Typically 10' of pipe/flex duct depending on diameter should work. The larger the dia the longer the ducting needed to trap the sound.
When I built my shop at the time I was doing 10 gallon batches of beer and a fair amount of welding. I installed a 20X20 fan with automatic shutters in the end wall with about a 1/3 hp motor. First time I fired it up I thought it would suck the drywall off the studs until I opened a window. Forgot to open the window once and sucked the fire in the woodstove right into the room. In the summer it works better then the dust collector and filters combined. 8-)
That is the way it used to be done here on the Gulf Coast, nothing fancy, using what was known at the time as an "attic fan", usually installed in a gable end wall, and with a single, shuttered louvered vent in the ceiling in a hall way in the house. The air flow when attic fan was turned on pulled the hallway shutters up.
No duct work necessary, no fancy names, just a simple and very effective system which was our "air conditioning" on the Gulf Coast long before there was any such thing.
The SOP was to open various downstairs windows, just a strategic amount, depending upon the amount of air flow you wanted in that room.
At night we closed all the windows in the house except for those over each bed, which we opened only about six inches, and which provided an airflow that would make you eventually grab for the covers on the hottest of summer nights.
In a shop without an attic or with a vaulted ceiling, an "attic fan" works the same way, only without the need for ducts or ceiling vents if you have windows or doors.
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