Florida’s summer heat can be brutal and so can the accompanying cooling bills. Though we tend to notice the stifling heat’s impact on our day-to-day lives, sometimes the indirect impacts are a bigger problem. Improper ventilation and heat buildup can wreak havoc on your home.
While you may not be thinking of cooling your attic every day, it needs cooling and ventilation just like the rest of the rooms in your home. Solar attic fans are an investment that can save you from major home damage.
If an attic isn’t properly ventilated, it can lead to moisture build-up, which in turn can cause wood rot and mold growth. Solar attic fans, powered by the sun, work to increase or improve the air circulation in your attic and facilitate ventilation.
What Is a Solar Attic Fan?
Solar attic fans are powered by the sun to increase or improve the air circulation in your attic and facilitate ventilation. If an attic isn’t ventilated sufficiently, it can lead to moisture build-up, which can cause wood rot and mold growth.
Even though most building codes mandate that new homes have a passive ventilation system, these systems generally don’t provide enough pressure to move air through an attic to the outdoors. A solar attic fan can be used to pull air into your attic, circulate the air through the space, and move the air back outside.
How Does a Solar Attic Fan Work?
Ideally, a ventilation system is designed to continuously move air through your attic while keeping moisture out. A solar attic fan used in conjunction with a passive ventilation system achieves this.
Using a solar fan in your attic forces air in, through, and out of your attic. During the summer, a solar attic fan can lower the temperature in your attic by as much as 50%.
In addition to preventing the buildup of moisture and lowering the temperature in your attic, the benefits of solar attic fans include:
- Protection for your roof: By preventing the condensation of moist air, a solar attic fan can protect your roof and prolong its useful life. Depending on where you live and other factors, you may decide to run your attic fan year-round.
- Energy cost reduction: If you don’t have an attic fan, stagnant air stays in your attic without being refreshed. During the summer, this causes heat to build up, and the average temperature in an attic during the summer is 160°F.
Because your attic is so hot, the air conditioning that keeps your living space cool has to work harder since the heat that’s stored in your attic transfers to the rest of your house.
A solar attic fan stops the buildup of hot air, prevents your air conditioner from having to increase its workload, and saves you money as a result. The great thing is it does all of this without adding to your utility costs because it’s powered by the sun rather than by electricity.
Costs vs. Benefits of a Solar Attic Fan
The cost of a solar attic fan will depend on numerous factors, including its cfm and manufacturer. Current prices for certain types of solar attic fans range from around $375 up to just under $800.
According to HGTV.com, a solar attic fan installation costs between $100 and $150. Of course, that cost will vary depending on where you live and the company you hire to install your solar attic fan, among other factors.
Despite the upfront costs involved with installing a solar attic fan, installing one is the type of home improvement project that will pay you back short- and long-term.
Installing a solar attic fan will start to pay you back in the short-term by reducing your federal tax burden and, possibly, the taxes you owe to your state.
To appreciate the true value of this federal tax credit, you have to understand what a tax credit is. Unlike a tax deduction, which reduces the amount of your income that is subject to taxes, a tax credit reduces the amount of tax you owe on a dollar-for-dollar basis.
If you spent $500 on your solar attic fan and paid a company $150 to install it, you would be able to claim a credit of ($500 + $150) x .30, or $195, on your federal tax return. If you owed $600 in federal tax before you bought and installed your solar attic fan, you would owe just $405 after your equipment was put into service. To see if you’re eligible for a tax credit at the state level, you should contact your state’s Department of Revenue or your tax preparer.
In addition to helping you save money on your federal taxes in the short-term, installing a solar attic fan can help you save money on your utility bill over time. How quickly your fan will pay for itself depends on various factors, including how much you paid for your fan and its installation, the energy prices in your area, and the efficiency of the insulation you have in your attic.
Depending on these things and a few other factors, it’s possible that your solar attic fan can save you enough on the cost of utilities to have paid for itself in as little as one or two summers of use. Some experience 30% lower cooling costs by using an attic fan.
How Solar Attic Fans in Florida Differ From Whole-House Fans
Now that you’re familiar with what solar attic fans are, how they work, and the benefits they provide, you may be wondering how they differ from whole-house fans. The biggest difference is their purposes.
As was explained earlier, the purpose of a solar attic fan is to circulate air through your attic to facilitate the ventilation of the space and protect your home. The purpose of a whole-house fan is to cool down your entire living space.
In general, people use their whole-house fans to cool their houses at nighttime. A solar attic fan is designed to run when the temperature in your attic rises to a certain temperature, such as 90°F.
A whole-house fan, on the other hand, is typically used when the temperature outside drops lower than the current temperature in your home and can bring the inside to a more comfortable level.
Lower Energy Costs With a Solar Attic Fan
Like a solar attic fan, a whole-house fan can help lower your energy costs, too. A typical whole-house fan draws between 200 to 700 watts compared to the 2,000 to 5,000 watts that are usually drawn by a central air conditioner.
This means a whole-house fan uses only about 10 to 20% of the power that a central air conditioner uses to cool your living space. Therefore, during the evening when the temperature goes down, it can be more energy-efficient to use a whole-house fan for cooling your home rather than the air conditioner.
Like a solar attic fan, a whole-house fan is normally mounted in the attic of a home, but in a different location. A solar attic fan is typically located near the peak of a roof, where the hottest air is, in a location that’s central to your attic’s intake vents.
A whole-house fan is ordinarily mounted in the floor of an attic, behind a rectangular grill, above a central hallway. To use a whole-house fan, you first open the windows on the first floor, close the damper in your fireplace, and turn on the fan. The fan then draws the cooler exterior air inside and pulls it through your living space.
Calculating The Size of Your Attic for a Solar Attic Fan
Solar attic fans and whole-house fans differ in other ways, including the number of cubic feet of air they move per minute and their venting requirements. As a general rule, a solar attic fan should be big enough to provide 10 changes of air per hour.
To calculate your needs, measure the number of cubic feet of volume in your attic. Then, multiply your attic volume by 10 air changes per hour to determine the flow of air your space requires.
Next, divide your total flow by 60 to get the cubic feet per minute, or cfm, you’ll need. Since fans are typically rated in cfm, this number will help you identify the size of the fan that will do best in your space. It will also tell you if you’ll need more than one solar attic fan. Additionally, in most cases, you’ll need to have at least one square foot of exhaust for every 360 cfm.
Typical whole-house fans normally have a rating that’s between 2,000 and 6,000 cfm. In general, a whole-house fan requires one square foot of exhaust for every 750 cfm. If your vents have insect screens on them, you’ll need to make your exhaust openings approximately 50% larger than the general requirement.
Solar Attic Fans vs. Whole-House Fan Installation
Another way solar attic fans differ from whole-house fans is the complexity of their respective installations. Since a solar attic fan doesn’t run off electricity, wires don’t have to be run during their installation.
Whole-house fans, on the other hand, require more labor-intensive and time-consuming installations since they’re heavier and must be wired for electricity.
Environmental Benefits of Using Solar Energy
One final way in which solar attic fans are different from whole-house fans is their carbon footprints. Whole-house fans need electricity to work, and electricity is normally generated from oil and coal or natural gas.
When oil and coal are burned to produce energy, greenhouse gas emissions are released, which can harm the environment as they continue to build up in the atmosphere over time. Since solar attic fans don’t require electricity, using them doesn’t release greenhouse gas emissions or add to the pollution in the air.
Even though a lot of high-tech equipment might be needed to produce solar equipment, the process to create this equipment does less damage to the environment than the mining, drilling, and fracturing that are required to extract coal, oil, and natural gas from the earth.
In fact, the International Panel on Climate Change reported that coal and natural gas can produce between eight and 51 times as many damaging greenhouse gas emissions as home solar power production does.
Additional environmental benefits of using solar energy include:
- Reduced risk: Extracting coal, oil, and natural gas from the earth and transporting these fossil fuels have environmental risks associated with them that generating solar power simply doesn’t. When oil is being transported, for instance, there is always the chance a spill might occur, which can have devastating effects on the environment. For example, after the Exxon Valdes oil spill, it took sea otters 25 years to recover to their pre-spill levels.
- Reduced dependency: As alternative energy sources such as solar power are used more often by private consumers and businesses, the nation’s dependency on fossil fuels will drop. Currently, only about 1% of electricity is derived from solar power, even though the sunlight that hits the earth every day is more than 2,500 times the amount of energy used in the United States daily.
- Reduced depletion: As the nation’s dependency on oil, coal, and natural gas decreases, the need to harvest these resources from the earth will also drop. This will slow the depletion of the country’s finite fossil fuel supplies.
Contact Del-Air Plumbing, Air Conditioning, Electric Today
If you’d like a quote for the cost of a solar attic fan and its installation, contact Del-Air Plumbing, Air Conditioning, Electric today. Whether you need a solar attic fan, a brand-new HVAC system, or something else, the talented professionals in our sales department can provide a quote for you. With more than 400 fully stocked trucks staffed with expert, experienced technicians, we can install the system you need the very next day.
At Del-Air Plumbing, Air Conditioning, Electric, we’re 100% committed to making sure you’re comfortable in your home at all times. That’s why we’re dedicated to providing the HVAC equipment and services you need to keep your home properly heated and cooled whenever you need them.
When you choose Del-Air for your HVAC needs, you’re working with a company that’s as invested in maintaining the comfort of your home as you are. That’s why we offer a full range of maintenance and service programs to ensure your system is operating as effectively and efficiently as possible at all times.
That’s also why we sell and service every major brand — to ensure you have the system that suits your home the best and that you have someone you can trust to keep your system running properly for as long as possible.
Contact us today to learn more or schedule services.
