Get nice heavey curtains and keep them closed during the day. This will actually help alot!! During the evening and night open windows and curtains and let the cool air come into the house. When you wake up in the morning close the windows and curtains and keep the warm air and sun from entering the house. This will keep it very cool during a hot day. Also try not to use lights, as they also generate heat.
I think people have mixed feelings about attic fans and if they help to actually keep the house cool. I live in NY and we generally don't have them here as it is cooler so I can't give you advice on that.
-renee

If you have a large enough attic fan, it doesn't matter if the attic is over the addition or not. As long as it's connected to the rest of the house, you will be fine. Turn on the fan, open a window in the addition, and the air will be brought through the house.

I used to live in a house where we had a HUGE attic fan, probably 5 ft in diameter. Once the sun went down and it cooled off a bit outside, we'd turn that fan on, open a few windows, and the whole house was cooler in 10 minutes. Of course, on really steamy days, it doesn't work as well, but here in New England, luckily those days aren't the majority.

What insulation level is in the attic? If the house is very old it could probably stand to be increased.

Insulation in the attic (above the ceiling of the upper story) really helps in keeping the lower floors cooler, as the attic is where the huge heat build-up starts and is sustained on hot days.

We also have an attic fan (in a very old 2- tory house with central hallway and stairs) that we run from morning to night. We set it up so it can pull air up and through the house to the attic, or just exhaust the attic.

As soon as we wake up we open all the windows and let cool early morning air in. They stay open until dusk when the first floor windows are shut. The second floor ones stay open in bedrooms at night. Leaving the windows downstairs open at night gives us a lot of dampness and mildew problems, so we must get them closed before dew falls.

I know the "open windows all-day" regime is contrary to what some people do, but we find it works well, and after a winter of being closed inside the house I could not bear to be closed in all summer. We work at home, so we are here and can attend to window adjustment throughout the day as necessary.

This house is completely plastered and for that reason has very long heat/cooling cycles due to the thermal mass of the plaster.

We are in northern NY, where we can get weeks of pretty muggy hot weather (nothing compared to say Washington, DC, of course) but that's how the house was designed to operate. Obviously electric fans were not part of the design, but passive convective cooling was. We try to work with what we've got. We have no AC.

On really hot days, we use small fans inside the house to move the air around, which makes hot temps more comfortable.

One of the ways the orginal onwers stayed cool here is that they had two kitchens, so the summer cookstove is removed from the main body of the house and wing, and they had completely finished (with lathe and plaster) a room in the basement, where it is always cool.

I guess Spring is really underway when we've stopped getting ice-dam questions and are getting cooling questions. Hallejujah!

Molly~

In our previous house in NYState we had a whole house ceiling fan. It worked wonderfully. The only thing I would have done differently was to put the fan on a timer. Once we were in bed no one wanted to get up and turn it off.

I agree wholeheartedly about keeping the windows and curtains closed during the day. It works pretty well.
Another thing to consider is your landscaping. Look to see where the sun is strongest on the house during the day and plant trees in those places to help block the sun...make sure they are the type to loose their leaves in the fall so you get the most out of the winter sun.

Keep sun from hitting the house, especially the windows.

Shade trees, an annual vine on a trellis, shade screens ... whatever suits the location.

Also - at night, open windows on the top floor to let out hot air, and open a couple on the bottom floor top let cooler air in. The best pattern is to have the open windows on opposite sides of the house.

Heavy drapes especialy on the sun side/s of the house. Well watered and maintained landscaping on the afternoon shade sides of the house.
A whole house fan located in a central hallway.
The fan can be timed and/or manual.
The logic is to open windows on the shade side in the afternoon. The fan draws the cool air in off the landscaping, pressurizing the attic, forcing the heated air out of the attic through venting, because the heated attic, re-radiats the heat back into the living space through the ceiling.
Just as a point of reference, I've installed these from Elsinore to Ventura and with any like system, you'll need to adjust how you use it, to your life style.

I am going to try these three things since central air conditioning is not practical in my house in CA (city doesn't allow rooftop equipment and the crawlspace is very shallow with an old foundation wall in the middle of the house that would have to be busted through): 1. awnings 2. insulated curtains 3. removable tinted window film during the summer. We will see...

We lived in Colorado for 30 years -- few people have central air. We had a 5000 sq ft ranch that was kept nice and cool with a whole house fan. When I came home from work, I'd open a few windows, turn on the fan, and within 5 minutes, it was wonderfully cool.

It's real hot here in the semi-desert.

I found just exterior blinds over the big south/west windows was enough for me.

Okanagan

buddyben;

They may not allow roof mounted equip., but they do not restrict yard pads which do not require breaking foundations.

Do yourself a favor, install a whole house fan.

We have about 3 nights worth of coolness in our basement. In really hot weather we open the furnace in the basement and turn the fan on manually each evening to distribute the cool air to the upper floors. In the early morning we turn it off and follow many of the house cooling procedures others have mentioned.

I was thinking this morning (the third in a row of unseasonably warm weather) why we find opening the house during the day to be more effective for keeping cool than the oft-repeated advice to keep it closed up, with curtains drawn.

I belive I know the answer: we both work here during the day, rather than going away to work. If we worked in other locations, I think we would leave it closed so we would come home to a home still holding in the previous night's cool.

However, we are going in and out and enjoy working near open windows, so we find it's better to begin ventilation in the morning and continue all day. We also can risk having everything wide open with no concern for any approaching storms since we are here to get everything buttoned up when needed.

Since this is an old farmhouse, it would always have had people in or near the building during the day, so probably the design evolved to take that into account.

Nowadays people are away from home all day, so different strategies would be better.

Molly~

I'm new to the idea of a whole house fan. Is this just a large fan, or? What does it look like and where can it be purchased?

Whole house fans have been around for at least 30 yrs. that I know of. They are available from just about any do it yourself lumber place.
The go in the ceiling..usually in a hallway.
Flip a switch open the windows and it draws in the cool evening air. Pulls the warm air up to the attic where it escapes thru the vents.

Snoonyb, what is a yard pad?

Thanks, everyone for your great suggestions. My home is one story -- if that makes any difference. Has anyone heard of dormer fans?

We have a dormer fan in the attic (ours is a one story also) and it does wonders for cooling the house. We did have two fans in the roof and one stopped working a couple years ago and I kept saying to my husband the house is hotter than usual. He thought I was crazy for noticing but when he went in the attic one was broken. That's when we replaced with the dormer fan. It makes a big difference. We bought ours at HD for maybe $100 or so. They have a termostat that you set for when you want it to kick on so you really don't have to do much after the install. Hope this helps.

We have central air, but I hate using it unless it's absolutely necessary. On most days when I leave for work in the morning, I close up all windows and draw curtains and blinds shut. I use the fan on our furnace to circulate the air. Our basement is always much cooler. Leaving the furnace fan on circulates this air through the house and is much less expensive than air conditioning. We have a 1 1/2 storey home so some times the upper floor does get very warm. On those occasions I cave and turn on the air. I just can't sleep when it's too humid. Fans do a great job keeping the air conditioning bills lower.

Thank you, everyone, for the great suggestions.
Hate to admit it, but I've come to the conclusion that I'm simply too lazy for anything but central AC.

Jacquelynn

buddyben;

A yard pad is the concrete pad that the A/C compressor sets on.

Jacquelynn;
Ask your utility the cost to operate a 3/4 hp motor for 1 hour, then ask the same of a 1/3rd.

One way is Texas air conditioning: open the windows at night when it's cool, close them (and the curtains) during the day so the house doesn't heat up. Ceiling fans also help a lot.

Also, I am considering making my own underground heat transfer pipe. Take 4" or 6" PVC pipe, run it out of the house, run it 24" underground for about 16 feet or so, then back to house. By the time the air gets back to the house it has been cooled by the underground. Put a fan in one end to blow the air through and I'm done.

Keep in mind a wider pipe (6") will hold more air, and require more time (length of underground pipe) to cool down said air, and will require a little more powerful fan. I was thinking of a computer biscuit fan to run the thing, but I might have to use a small desktop fan.

We replaced all our windows which made a huge difference in how hot the house gets in the first place. In addition, the ill-fitting aluminum sliders were replaced with double-hungs. Opening top and bottom, even just a crack, provides a much better breeze than opening a slider all the way.

we have a fan that is in our upper hallway, not sure what it is but it is mounted in the ceiling and when you turn it on, it opens up. It sucks all the air from the lower floors upward and really cools the house quickly. We also have a big attic fan with a thermostat. Sounds like you got great advice and I too only resort to CA when we are in a hot spell, you get that in Ohio.

Wow, what a great collection of ideas... I'm in CA trying to keep my non-airconditioned upstairs bedrooms of my townhouse cool -- thank you so much for reminding me that I can use the fan from my furnace!

Also, I've been told that wooden interior blinds are better insulators so I just went and purchased them (both for the looks and practicality). I'm hoping that they, along with the insulated curtains will help...

I used to live in muggy New England on a 3rd floor apt. luckily with cross-ventilation. If I positioned a box fan
with its intake in the (north) cool corner of the house and positioned a box fan with its "out" in the warmest corner, and closed most other windows in between, I *was* able to cool down the house -- only cost was the fan noise :-(

Thanks again all....

Has anyone had any luck making an "under-the-eaves" attic living space cooler without air conditioning? I have a room on the upper floor of my 1 1/2 storey bungalow that gets super hot in the summer (luckily I'm in Minnesota so the unbearable heat is no more than a few weeks each summer). I've used a window air conditioner in the past but I live alone and heaving it into the window, then taking it down each year is getting too much for me to handle. Besides, I really hate air conditioning--that closed up, even chilly, feeling. Do you think a combination of window fans and large portable fans might do the trick? There are three large windows.

We have a ceiling fan in almost every room. I was against this as I find them so ugly, but my husband wore me down.

I hate to admit it, but it keeps the house really cool, esp. when we have a cross breeze going.

We also have three ac units but I don't even find we need that. I also keep the shades down and we have new windows on second floor.

I have to say I am enjoying this air so much better than when we had central a/c.

I'm only telling this as it was told to me, you understand. Scientists say that fireplaces lose more heat up the chimney than they add to the room. This is why a scientist will in the Summer build a fire in the fireplace to cool the house. Have you tried this?

Fires can't cool a room, but what they do do is to get a really good draft going up the chimney that sucks air from the room, up and out. In the winter that warm, centrally-heated air that is being siphoned out will be replaced by cold, outdoor air infiltrating where it can. In the summer, hot air will be sent up the chimney all right, only to be replaced by hot outdoor air.

Now, if the air in the room is warmer than the air outside, that might work. But you also have to consider the effects of the radiant heat from the fire warming the objects in the room that are in front of the fireplace. (Radiant heating is a heating effect that doesn't heat the air in a space, but only the objects that can absorb it. Stand in front of an outdoor bonfire on a very cold day. The air between you and the fire is cold, but you still feel warm because you, being solid, soak up the radiant energy from the fire. At least, the side of you facing the fire feels warm. You have to keep turning around to stay evenly warm.)

A scientist might build a fire to get air moving through a space, but I'd be really surprised if s/he expected it to actually cool things off.

It was a joke!

Ah, sorry. I teach physics, and I hear comments/questions like that all the time. Some people think that way!

In hot steamy muggy south Texas we use everything we can to stay cool. AC's are a must and we run them night & day. Use ceiling fans and floor fans at the same time to keep the air moving. Keep blinds and curtains closed. Use more layers over a window if it has a sun problem. Even a blanket hung over a problem window can help. Trees which shade are a blessing. If you have central AC, have a spare window unit around if the central goes out and if you only have window units, have at least one spare in your garage if one goes out. If the electricity goes out, leave town.

keep doors windows shut during the day.Alot cooler inside than out,ceiling fan,Also like you said the whole house fan.I dont want air conditioning.Hubby is a builder hes in heat all day,cant take the air conditioner.I dont feel good in it.

I'm just the opposite. I love AC. Walking from 90 degree, 99% humidity into cool, dry air... bliss! I live where we only need AC typically a few weeks in the summer, but during those few weeks... well, it's a blessing.

My mother liked "fresh" air. Well, of course, who doesn't? But when it's very hot and humid and hazy out? It drove me and my sisters mildly crazy. Just when the house was finally cool and dry, we'd feel/smell that little fetid curl of hot, humid air and discover that Mom had opened a window "just to get a little air." On cool, fresh days I'll throw open the windows and doors too, but damp, stagnant hot air doesn't feel fresh to me!

Do you have exposed hardwood floors already? If not, ripping up carpet, if you have the flooring underneath, will help along with another posters advice of heavy curtains.

You can install a mini-split air conditioner. The compressor is on the outside (it can be on a roof, balcony, or on the ground), and the cooling unit is on the inside, with the two connected by a flexible copper tube. It is much less expensive than central air.

LG and Mitsubishi make good units.

Here is a link that might be useful: Mitsubishi Mr. Slim

Get some electric dormer or roof fans for your attic. Most automatically turn on when the temp in the attic reaches a certain level. Insulation is huge, and not just in the attic. Make sure that the walls are also insulated, and the floors. Make sure your doors and windows fit snugly: shine a flashlight around the premimeter and fill in wherever you can see the light from the other side. I grew up in Atlanta with an attic fan, and it made a huge difference. Ceilings fans are also great. I have storm windows that open on the bottom, and closing them up keeps the windows from transmitting heat. Even if you end up with central air, things like this mean that the AC doesn't have to work as hard and you don't have to use it as much, which can save you a huge amount on your electrity bills.

Here's a quick caution regarding whole house fans. They can cause problems for people with allergies or asthma.

I installed a whole house fan a few years ago and it does work wonderfully. It moves a massive volume of air in a hurry.

But my wife has allergies and the fan pulls all sorts of pollen and dust inside the house. As a result, we have severely limited the use of our whole house fan.

Bob

To Bus_Driver and vjrnts... Actually, there is a historic house (now a museum) in New Orleans that indeed used fire to cool the house. There is a large, centrally placed dome at the top floor of the house. There is a system of gas-piping with burners encircling the base of the dome and vents near the top of the dome to allow the heat (and exhaust) to escape out the top of the dome. To cool the house, windows are opened on the lower floors (usually on the shaded sides of the house), the dome vents are opened, and the gas fires are ignited at the base of the dome. The resulting draft pulls fresh air upward through the house. I believe the house and cooling system was built in the 1840s and 50s, long before electrical attic fans and A/C.

I have not visited the museum, but saw a "This Old House" episode about it, and I have seen the house featured on several TLC and Discover Channel shows. IÂm still looking for a website about it, but wanted to get this in the discussion in case anyone else knows about the house.

To others, A/C compressor units (for both whole-house and Mini-Split A/C systems), can also be placed in the attic if there is enough room and sufficient support. An attic fan, venting, and in some systems ducting, is then used to pull the hot air produced by the A/C, out of the attic.

Keeping the house cool is next to impossible here in this crazy heat! We have the thermostat at 83, and we're tee-tottering on the edge of discomfort, but hey, it's better than 105, I suppose.

Last summer, we bought this house. It had a fireplace insert which was removed, so we were left w/ a fireplace and no doors. Put on doors,--- not the cheapest, not the most expensive. I could put my hand in front of where the two doors met and still feel a breeze. So, since we had a cooler than usual winter, I taped a couple big old bath towels to hang in front of the stupid doors. It was so scary. We would sit in the living room and actually see the towels "breath" in and out. Yes, the flue was closed, as closed as can be.

So, I had enough of this stupid, drafty fireplace. About 3 months ago, I measured the area (just above plain view) of the circumference of the chimney, just below the lever that opens/closes the flue and cut a board slightly smaller. I did have to notch it for the lever. Then, I bought and stuffed upholstery foam, cut in 2" wide strips to stuff around the board. The board is secured in place with two 1x2s on the sides, up against the brick.

I cannot tell you how much of a HUGE difference this has made this summer. We both cannot believe that our west-facing living room went from being the hottest room in the house to actually one of the coolest. I truly believe our cool (and hot air in the winter) was just being replaced w/ hotter air!

We would love a whole house fan. I am so envious of anyone who has and uses one. Unfortunately, Bob F is right, though. My fiance who has horrible allergies (and of course my asthmatic cat) could not handle the dust and allergens brought it with it,--- and believe me, they are sucked in.

There's an attic fan in my house. While it instantly cools the area immediately by it (good as there are no ac vents there) and does a good job cooling downstairs as well, it also manages to pull up odors in certain rooms of the house. The bathroom ends up smelling acidic, almost urine-y, the home office smells very musty 'old house' and lately the living room has an unpleasant odor too! I have no idea where these smells reside (especially the bathroom, as it did have a damp towel/pet smell with the prior owners but I've removed the carpet and had tile installed, removed wallpaper and primed and painted the walls and ceiling), but the attic fan is guaranteed to bring them out. So that deters me from using it; hadn't thought about allergens but I'm sure it's even better at sucking those up.

When we lived in KS (1950s) we kept windows closed during the summer day; at noon Mom would say, "time to open the east, close up the west." We pulled all the curtains, and shades.

When it was time to reroof our house here in NC, I had an almost white roof put on - it refelcts a lot of the summer sun and heat.