Quiet Cool Whole House Fans vs Traditional Style House Fans
Quiet Cool Whole House Fans vs Traditional Style House Fans
Are you the type of person who likes to open their windows at home? If you are, stay tuned because we are going to be talking about Whole House fans.
Whole house fans are mounted in your ceiling and are used to bring the cooler air outside into your home. By opening your windows around the house, the whole house fan will bring air outside your home to come inside. This way you have fresh air coming into your home.
The second benefit of a whole house fan is that it cools off your attic, so the entire home can perform better, and save you energy.
Don’t confuse these with attic ventilating fans mounted on the gable vent in your attic pointing outwards, the whole house fans mount in your ceiling and point towards the attic.
The difference here is, a whole house fan will complete the cooling process much faster and probably bring your attic to a lower temperature than an attic fan ever could.
We carry two types of whole-house fans, the QuietCool brand and Triangle brand of whole house fans. We love them both, but for different reasons. People usually find themselves liking one or the other, too.
QuietCool is a brand that has stormed the industry with innovative thinking and low energy usage fans too. They started up in 2003 out of Temecula, California.
Triangle Whole House Fans are the more traditional style fans. They are a little bigger and might run at a little higher decibel rating, but they move a ton of air very quickly.
Getting straight to it, we want to point out the features of both fans, and then let you decide which one is best for your home.
The first whole house fan is QuietCool Whole House Fan.
Many are drawn to it because as an HVAC technician, many liked the idea of attaching a flexible duct to the grille and then placing the fan on the other side of the 10 ft duct. That way the sound of the fan is insulated.
They have different capacities for fans too. QuietCool even has a sizing formula page on their website that is pretty easy to use. But they are suggesting on their website that we size the system for between 2 and 3 CFMS.
So, if your home is 1000 sq. ft, you’ll want a system that can move between 2000 and 3000 CFMS of air. So, then you go over to the different models and find the Trident Pro 2.5 and Trident Pro3.3 will move between 2500 to 3300 CFMS of air.
The technology we like about QuietCool fans is in the insulated damper that shuts off any access to the attic when the system is turned off. Because the damper has an R-5 insulation rating on it, they do a good job preventing heat from the attic from coming into the home when the fan is turned off.
In 2011, QuietCool became the first to incorporate ECM motors with the fan.
ECM motors run quietly and at lower amperages than regular PSC motors. PSC motors are the ones that you’ve seen on traditional whole-house fans since the 1960s. They also require a capacitor to run properly and If the capacitor fails, the motor won’t work. So, you’d have to replace the capacitor before the motor would work again.
ECM motors are electronically commutating motors. A point we want to make here, is in studying the QuietCool ECM motors in the Stealth Proline, we found they operate better at lower fan speeds.
Let’s say we have a two-story, 2200 square ft home.
We installed the 1.5 Trident Pro in the Master Bedroom ceiling near the door and put a 3.3 Trident Pro at the top of the stairs on the second floor.
When we turned them on for the first time, we aren’t really happy with the volume of air it was moving.
It was nice but we guess we were looking for more. So, from then on, we always recommended to people they get the biggest one they can afford and use the 3-speed switches they give you and adjust the airflow accordingly. The motors run more efficiently at lower speeds anyways.
Point made about QuietCool’s volume issues. We’ve mentioned it a few times before and oversizing your QuietCool fan allows you to use lower speeds which saves money in the long run.
Triangle Whole House Fans
When you mention traditional style whole-house fans, people think about loud, whirring, helicopters, rumbling in their homes and QuietCool does a good job of making that point on their website. But let’s take a look at an American classic, the CC Series of Triangle Whole House Fans.
As technicians working in hot attics, we noticed how much more air these traditional style whole house fans seemed to be moving. In fact, we’ll turn these whole-house fans on during hotter days so we can bring the temperature of the home up into the attic, which is, at times, 30-40 degrees difference and the homeowner has fresh ambient temperatures coming into the home through their open windows.
The blades are larger, thicker, and more durable.
The belt drive is the secret to its quiet nature as well. The motor sits on top of the frame instead of near the ceiling joists.
Other store-bought whole house fans have the motor mounted directly to the fan blade without the use of a tension belt.
You really have to hear it to believe the difference between store-bought whole house fans and Triangle whole-house fans.
All the noisy traditional style fans we’ve seen were old too like 20 years or older. You’ll feel and hear the difference in sound and volume of air once it is installed.
Think of these as the luxury cruisers of the whole house fans. How much air do they really move?
QuietCool fans are sized in 1.5 for 1500 CFMS, 2.5 for 2500 CFMS, 3.3, 4.8, 5.5, 6.0 and 7.0 models. So, 7000 CFMS is the max you can get from a QuietCool fan.
Triangle fans are sized in 24”, 30”, 36”. They do have a 42” and 48” but we don’t have them around here. The most common 30” fan moves over 7000 CFMS of air, and the 36” fan moves over 9700 CFMS of airs.
That’s almost 3000 CFMS more than QuietCool’s biggest fan. So that’s pretty impressive for us.
So, where are they installed? Both of these fans are mounted in the ceiling. The triangle fan is mounted on top of the ceiling joist in the attic, bringing the fan blade further back to reduce noise. So, no cutting of the ceiling joists is involved.
The QuietCool fans can be installed in between the ceiling joists without having to cut anything either. And as always, the center of the home is the best place to put your whole house fan. Zoning your home with a couple of these fans is pretty common too.
As we said, an average house has two QuietCool fans. One in the Master bedroom and one in the main hallway. We like to close the door to the master bedroom at night so having a small fan in the room really helps on those nights when the breeze has kicked in.
Most people don’t create a whole new dedicated electrical circuit for these fans either. They usually tie into the existing HVAC electrical circuit for the furnace and the reason for that is, nobody runs both the whole house fan and their furnace or HVAC system at the same time.
So, here’s something you might not know about getting a whole house fan.
Getting a whole house fan is a great idea but do you have enough attic ventilation so that when you draw in outside air, where does that air go once it’s in the attic?
If it just compresses up in the attic and there’s nowhere for that air to go, then you’re not maximizing the potential of the fan.
You’ll want to take a good look at the ventilation in your attic because you can only bring in as much air as you can discharge out of your attic vents. If the air doesn’t go out of your attic vent, it will go down your walls and other penetrations accessible to the attic.
QuietCool recommends you provide 1 sq. ft. of venting for every 750 CFMS of air that can move. So, if you got a 4.8 model that pushes 4800 CFMS of air and If you divide the 4800 CFMS by 750, you’ll get 6.3 sq. ft.
So, 6.3 sq. ft is the total size of all the vents in your roofing system that is required to meet factory specs when it comes to ventilation for these fans.
What about Warranties on these whole-house fans? A 15-year warranty comes with the QuietCool Systems. Only a 1-year warranty comes from the manufacturer of Triangle Whole House fans. So that’s kind of lopsided there. QuietCool says they will replace any part that fails for the warranty of that system.
What do you think? Which whole house fan do you think is better? Have you seen or heard these older style fans?
What do you think about them? And what do you think about QuietCool’s fan? Is it strong enough?
So, DIY or get a contractor. The best DIYers can install these themselves.
A little electrical knowledge about switches and proper ventilation of the attic will go a long way installing these.
If you do need a little more help with installing a whole house fan here in the Red Deer area, we’d love to be the company that gets to do that for you.
Feel comfortable calling us at Red Deer Heating and AC today.
