Solar Attic Fan Installation in Boulder, Golden and the Front Range

A solar attic fan moves hot air out of your attic using nothing but sunlight. No wiring, no electrician, no operating cost, and it runs hardest on exactly the days your attic needs it most.

In Colorado, with our sun exposure and our temperature swings, it is a genuinely good product. It is also one of the easiest things in this industry to install badly, and the difference comes down to what else is going on in the attic.

What It Does

Attic temperatures on a hot Front Range afternoon routinely run far above the outdoor air temperature. That heat sits directly above your ceiling and radiates down into the living space, which makes your second floor hot and your air conditioner work harder to hold a setpoint.

Passive ventilation, which is what most homes have, relies on hot air rising out of ridge or gable vents and cooler air being drawn in through soffits. It works, slowly, when conditions cooperate. A solar attic fan actively moves the air instead of waiting for it to move on its own.

Benefits homeowners actually notice: cooler upstairs rooms in summer, less run time on the air conditioner, longer roof material life, and reduced moisture accumulation in winter, which matters for mold and for ice damming.

Why Air Sealing Comes First

Here is the part most companies selling attic fans will not tell you.

A powered fan pulls air out of the attic. It has to replace that air from somewhere. If the attic is properly ventilated and the ceiling below it is properly air sealed, the replacement air comes in through the soffit vents, which is the whole idea, and the fan moves attic air.

If the ceiling below is full of unsealed top plates, can lights and penetrations, some of that replacement air gets pulled up out of your house. Now the fan is exhausting air you already paid to cool, and drawing warm humid outdoor air in through the leaks to replace it. You still get a cooler attic. You also get a bigger cooling bill than you expected, and you never find out why.

This is not a reason to skip the fan. It is a reason to do the work in the right order. Air seal the ceiling plane, confirm the intake ventilation is adequate to feed the fan, then install it. Done that way a solar attic fan performs the way it is supposed to, and the same air sealing that makes the fan work is the work that makes your insulation work.

We assess the attic before we quote a fan, because selling you a fan that fights your own house is not a good outcome for either of us.

What We Look At

• Existing intake ventilation. A fan without adequate soffit intake will pull from wherever it can, which is usually your house.
• The condition of the ceiling plane below, and what it would take to seal it
• Attic volume and layout, including sections that do not connect to each other
• Existing exhaust equipment. In many cases we can replace an outdated or failed powered exhaust fan with a solar unit.
• Whether a fan is the right spend at all, or whether the same money in air sealing and insulation would do more for you

We work through the building science with you and make sure the house gets what it actually needs. Sometimes that is a fan. Sometimes it is a fan plus sealing. Occasionally it is sealing first and a fan next season.

Free attic assessment with photographs and a straight recommendation. Three certified BPI analysts on staff, over 340 five star reviews.