CINCINNATI Blog

Solar attic fans

Attic Fans…powered by Solar!

I get these questions quite often…Does my home need an attic fan?  How do they work and what are the benefits?

Your attic may be the last place on your mind. In a previous blog we discussed that an attic can account up to 45-50% of a buildings energy loss, our #1 area that needs to be addressed, remember your attic can reach as high as 150F. This space acts as your home’s heat shield and therefore has a major impact on the temperature in the rest of the building.

As the summer sun blasts down on your roof, the entire structure absorbs the energy, which radiates into the attic space and then is conducted downward by the home’s framing. This heats up the actual living space —making you turn up your AC and increasing your electricity bill. If you can improve ventilation in your attic and reduce the amount of heat the space holds and pushes into your home, you’ll reduce the cooling load on your air conditioner and save money on your utility bills. When exploring ways to improve the ventilation of your attic, consider installing a solar attic fan to keep the hot air from settling in.

How Does an Attic Fan Work?

Attic ventilation fans help cool your attic by pushing out the stifling hot air from inside the attic and bringing in cool air from outside. This prevents hot air from seeping into your home and driving up the temperature in the living space, which reduces the load on your air conditioner.

Most homes already have some passive attic venting built in. Cool air enters the attic through soffit vents in the eaves. Once inside, the air heats up and rises higher, ultimately exiting through venting at the roof’s gables, through ridge vents cut into the roof’s apex or other vent holes in the roof. As the air leaves, it creates negative pressure behind it, sucking in cool air from below into the soffits and creating a self-repeating ventilation process. Even if your roof already has ridge vents and plenty of ventilation built in, it’s a good idea to install gable fans or roof fans to help blow hot, humid air out of the attic.

Solar fans also reduce moisture which can help with mold and mildew, increasing air exchangers per hour assists the passive venting which is currently in place.  In the winter, solar fans help to prevent moist air from condensing on the underside of the roof, beams, and rafters. Condensation can cause mildew, rotting of wood, and excessive rusting of some components of the roof structure. Solar fans help keep the attic dry.

Solar attic fans are the way to go, they require no other wiring, so they don’t cause any additional charges on your electricity bill at all, they are extremely quiet and the products that we use at Koala Insulation of Cincinnati are run by an internal thermostat and humidistat.  In addition, they are guaranteed for life!   

Hopeful that this helps you with some basic information about Solar attic fans and the impact they can have on improving the ventilation in your attic!  More to follow in upcoming blogs, in the meantime please reach out to Koala Insulation of Cincinnati to help you answer any questions that you may have around energy efficiency, insulation and ventilation in your home or building to improve the efficiency as well as the comfort of those working or living in those conditioned spaces!