Proper Attic Ventilation is Helpful Year Round
Your attic may be out of sight and out of mind, but the conditions there greatly affect your home’s overall health. And an attic fan is particularly essential to improving your home’s health.
Since heat naturally rises, attics can become nearly oven-like in the summer. On a stifling Long Island day, for example, a blast of hot air registering 150 degrees could greet you when you open the attic door. If this hot air stays inside your attic, the heat will eventually descend into your home, increasing the costs to cool your home and placing undue stress on your A/C.
In this case, an attic fan improves your home’s health by pushing the hot air outside and drawing cooler air inside the space through the attic vents. By cooling down your attic, an attic fan ultimately reduces your reliance on your air conditioner. And the less often you have to run your air conditioner, the lower your electricity bills will be.
Some attic fans come with a humidistat, which is effective at controlling excess moisture and humidity during the fall and winter seasons, and it enhances your home’s health by reducing the likelihood of ice dams. These mounds of ice begin to develop when a warm attic causes snow that’s on the roof to melt. And you don’t need an infamous Long Island blizzard to contend with ice dams; even a thin accumulation of snow can trigger the process.
Here’s usually how it happens: As snow on the upper part of a roof melts, water trickles down the sloped edge. It refreezes into a wedge of ice, usually near an overhang, forming a dam. This dam can be considerably long and large, blocking the drainage of water. Any additional melted snow pools against the dam and can leak into your home through the roof, trim, windows or ceiling. The repair bills can be mind-boggling.
The experts at T.F. O’Brien Cooling & Heating fully appreciate the contributions an attic fan can make to a home’s overall health. We also know that insulation and the quality of the air sealing in your attic need to be evaluated, too. Call us today so that we can make your attic fan “house call†tomorrow.
Our goal is to help educate our customers about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.
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