Fans in the attic? The idea at first may sound odd. We usually think of fans as blowing somewhere in our home where we can feel their effects, like hanging from ceilings or mounted in windows. Few people spend more time in their attic than they absolutely must, so it seems useless to install fans there.

However, attic fans can form an important part of maintaining the overall efficiency of your air conditioning system. If you’ve taken all the steps you can to keep your HVAC system working its best (regular maintenance, duct cleaning, changing the filter, proper insulation), attic fans will take you a step beyond. We’ll explain why putting in attic fans will benefit you.

Attics are both heat traps and heat escape routes. You can use insulation to stop heat from escaping in winter, but what about summer, when heat gathers in the attic and creates excessively high temperatures that will seep into other parts of your home? (Go up into your attic on a hot day and see what it’s like. It can be miserable. You don’t want any of that to get to rooms you actually use.) To stop summer attic heat, you’ll need attic fans.

Attic fans should be wired to a thermostat that will turn the fan on based on the temperature. This saves energy since you won’t have to keep the fan on constantly or continually check on it. The movement of air in the attic will lower the high temperature.

The first benefit is the most obvious: your home will not get as hot during the summer. On average, the temperature in the attic will decrease 50 degrees with a fan, which means a drop of 10 degrees in your house.

This not only translates into comfort, it also means savings on your energy bills. A cooler house requires less work from an air conditioner to cool it. You’ll spend less, and your air conditioner will not receive extra stress that will lead to repairs and possibly an early replacement.

Attic fans will also extend the life of your roof. Rising moisture in your home will get into the roof, eventually creating mold in the insulation and the roof material. In winter, the freezing moisture can be extremely damaging. Attic fans move moisture away and keep it from settling.

Tripped circuit breaker: many of us have experienced them at some point in our homes, yet instead of asking ourselves, “Why Do Breakers Trip?”, we reset the breaker without much thought. Before flipping the switch back over to the “ON” position, however, it’s important to understand why the breaker tripped in the first place, and what can be done to keep it from happening again.

Ignoring a Tripped Breaker is Not a Good Idea

Because of the many reasons why your circuit breaker could be tripping, and because of the purpose of the circuit breaker, you should never take a tripped breaker lightly. It’s important to understand that the circuit breaker is a safety device; simply switching the circuit back on without investigating the culprit can become costly in the long run and, in many cases, extremely dangerous.