Last summer, one of my long term grown-up dreams came true. We installed a whole house fan.

For years, I had the fan on my wishlist, but it was expensive. So summer after summer, we used window AC units and fans. They cooled part of the house, but never the whole thing.

Our upstairs wiring could only tolerate one AC unit, which left the master bedroom an icebox, but the other bedrooms too hot. The hot air would move around as the fans blew, but it wouldn’t leave. There were nights when you could stick your arm out the window and feel the cool air, but it refused to come in the house, probably because of science.

At night it was musical beds and floors trying to get everyone to a spot cool enough for sleep. (Strangely, my kids have been unimpressed with the technique I used to keep cool on hot summer nights as a child – sleeping with a cold, wet washcloth draped over me).

In the air conditioned master bedroom, I would wake up freezing and congested in the middle of an August night. I freeze all winter, because I’m a frugal lady who keeps the thermostat on the lowest temperature I can tolerate. But freezing in the summer didn’t feel right.

The spring of 2020 gave us time to slow down. We knew we would be home all summer long, and it seemed like the right time to spring for the fan. The Chaplain was watching my slow, steady burnout from the relentless grind of nonstop parenting and chronic stress and I think he would have done anything to make me smile. (I recognize how fortunate we were that the pandemic didn’t result in a loss of income for us, although the psychological toll of this time has been rather high.)

I ordered the fan in June. When it arrived, we found the wiring wasn’t what I thought, and we would need an electrician’s help to install it. We called a former neighbor who is an electrician. He came over and ran a new line from the basement fuse box up to the attic with a switch plate in the upstairs hallway.

We installed the fan ourselves in our attic space, which is accessible via ladder from a hole in the upstairs ceiling. The clearance in the space barely matched the specs for the fan. It has a 10 foot long exhaust vent. It looks like a giant, shiny caterpillar and it cuts down on noise. (All the parts fit through the hole you cut in the ceiling to install it.)

The internet had a wealth of handy guys installing fans like ours in the blink of an eye. We’ve done enough projects that we knew it would take us at least 15 times as long, and we were right.

It was July by the time we climbed up into the attic space, cut a hole in the ceiling at the top of the stairs, and got the fan in place. (<– This sentence contains multitudes.)

It took days of sweating and fumbling in the dark attic crawlspace with a work light, amongst the bodies of a thousand un-witnessed mice, living and dead. Insulation and dust were everywhere. Fortunately, we were experienced mask wearers by then, so we were prepared.

There is a part of me that is afraid we did it wrong, that we stuffed the fan in too small a space, which is going to cause it to break sooner than it would have in big, airy attic. Or maybe it will fall through the ceiling and kill us in our sleep, or just burn the house down. Yet it seems like everything is OK: the fan has been chugging along without a problem.

As soon as the temperature outside got to about 10 degrees lower than inside, usually in the early evening, we’d turn the fan on for the night. In order to get the air flow, you open at least one window halfway on the side of your house that is adjacent to your least smelly neighbor.

The switch for our fan has a timer, with increments between 1-8 hours. We usually ran the fan all night. You wake up chilly in the morning, breathing in fresh outside air, and it’s like you’ve been camping. The fan completely replaced our AC units.

We live in the city, so sometimes we are suddenly overcome by skunks, weed, or exhaust fumes, but smells move through quickly and the temperature drop is worth it. There is nothing like lying in bed on a summer night with a nice, strong, cool breeze coming through your window.

We were using it to cool the house at night all the way into November due to the mild fall weather. Since winter has set in, we’ve discovered other uses for the fan. When we burn something and fill the house with smoke, our kitchen fan does nothing, but the whole house fan quickly sucks the smoke out. (I wonder about coating the fan with kitchen grease. One day, I need to either get our kitchen fan properly vented, or go up and make sure the whole house fan isn’t getting a layer of gunk on it.)

This weekend, the Chaplain woke up with COVID-like symptoms. The Chaplain does home visits for hospice, but he wears full PPE for each visit these days, so we were hopeful that wasn’t what it was… but he went for a test right away and quarantined in our room all day afterwards.

I worked the night shift the night he got sick, and would need to sleep the next day. The Chaplain had pepped up and was feeling way better the next morning, but with no test results, he was wearing a mask and keeping his distance from us. (Strictly speaking, quarantining in this situation would have looked a little different if we were following guidelines to the letter, but we are alone with a house full of kids and we’re doing our best to mitigate risk without losing our minds.)

When I got home from work, I popped the house fan on with the windows to our bedroom wide open so if there was COVID in there, I could remove it before going to sleep (also, new pillowcases. We already use separate blankets in winter because it works for us). It was freezing, but fresh.

We had hoped for COVID results by tonight – but unfortunately they aren’t up yet, so the Chaplain is in our room, and I’m down on the sofa. Tomorrow, we’ll run the fan again for a while to keep things feeling fresh and germ-free.

Hopefully, he’ll get negative results back soon. (UPDATE: The results came in mid-morning the next day and the test was negative.) I miss the days when sleeping on the sofa was a joke we made about marital spats. When we fight, one person usually slinks to bed after the other instead of sleeping separately, which makes this feel especially egregious. We wouldn’t sleep separately even if we were fighting.

There have been a few downers with the fan – on humid days it drags damp air into the house. There are often a few hours in the late summer afternoon where the house is hot, but it’s too hot outside to run the fan. And the smells. Also, in order to work, interior doors and windows have to be open to allow the air to flow, which can be an issue if there is noise pollution in your neighborhood or if you want privacy from the other people in your house.

(For some people, it can make seasonal allergies worse, but my allergies were worse with the AC.)

A few months after we installed it, I went on our electricity provider’s website and compared our expenses to last year’s. Our bills were higher this summer than last summer, when we were using window AC’s – but there were a few things that could have caused this, like us being home ALL THE TIME.

I hope to compare numbers again this summer and maybe see a dip, but since there are so many people in the house (and they’re getting older, which means eating and showering more) it stands to reason for the next number of years, all our expenses will go up even if the house fan is actually saving us money.

Meanwhile, the benefits of the whole house fan keep growing. We have a kid who turns the entire house into a biohazard zone of horror when he poops. But the whole house fan works for that, too. (Sorry, neighbors! Hopefully the smell just floats out the attic vents and away).

So. House cooling? Check. Poop odor removal? Yes. Creates a breeze when it’s cold but you just want to feel some fresh air without leaving your house? Yes. Burned dinner? Not a problem. Removes airborne plague droplets? It’s a solid maybe.

Almost every day this past summer, the Chaplain and I looked at each other and had a moment of gratitude about the fan. I’ve been thankful all over again a surprising number of times since then, even in the middle of winter, knowing we were doing what we could to keep ourselves from giving each other the plague by keeping our indoor air circulating.

So as you sit, curled up under a blanket, not thinking about summer at all because it’s too cold and summer is never coming, maybe consider getting a whole house fan. You might be glad you did.

The photo is from summer 2020. The cute little feet belong to the baby. The box at the right has the fan in it. I couldn’t find any photos of the installation. Imagine being crouched on a rafter in the dark, dusty and sweating, accidentally dropping screws into mounds of insulation while trying not to put your knee through the ceiling, and that pretty much sums it up.

I linked the fan we installed, but this is not a sponsored post.