Sorry, I thought that I read somewhere in this thread about plastic covering vents?
BBP

From above:
"I do have the new ridge vent obstructed about 3 or 4 feet on either side of the air intake in the peak..
Otherwise, I end up pulling cold outdoor air into the basement.. "

Found it.. Up in Post #19 above, I posted:
"I just took some plastic shopping bags up and stuffed them into the slots in the attic peak.
Got 3 or 4 feet blocked off on each side of the intake.. Might help a bit.."


My air intake seems to have been sucking cold outdoor air right thru the ridge vent.
Now that the area around the in-take has been blocked, warm air can accumulate, and be pumped down to the basement.

I might remove the plastic bags during the hot summer (if that ever happens)..
So that 140F air isn't pumped down.. :eek:

If the air up there gets too hot, and over-heats my basement, I will re-write the program
to limit the max temp of the basement.
I can also change the time-of-day limits and allow night operation
and only use the min/max temperature limits, and max relative humidity limit.

So in my mini-attic situation, I would probably suck in too much outside air thru ridge vent?

BBP

If your air intake is close to the peak, it will create a low-pressure area, right under the ridge vent.
Especially if other air sources (vents) aren't close enough to the low-pressure
area to normalize the pressure.

The amount of outdoor air pulled in, will depend on the type of ridge vent.
If it's designed for a lot of flow thru, back-wards flow will happen.

That might not be good during a windy rain storm.
Make sure you have a humidity sensor on your blower control hardware.

My ridge vent is 40 feet long, so the blockage is a small percentage of the total.

I've never had any moisture problems in the attic, during the 35 years,
before we had the ridge vent installed..
So, I could block up a lot more of the vent if I really needed to.

Anyways, you can use sensors and tell if back-wards flow is occurring.
If the sensor near the vent shows 70F air, but 60F air is being pumped down,
there is cold air mixing going on.
After I plugged up the ridge vent close to the intake,
the heat of the air being pumped down, was the same as the peak sensors were showing.

Spring is in the air! (Attic air)!
 

After a few days of cold rain, the sun is out!!

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1396374709

That's more like it!!

Since it's so damp in the basement (sump pumps are running),
I set the differential to 5F.. It's now back to 20F.. :cool:

The basement air temp is up 4 deg F, since this morning.. :)

I've got the logging started..

The hot water tank sensor is now showing 125.9 F up from about 90 this morning..
That PV is working nicely right now.. Running about 1200 watts.

The basement is getting a little warmer!
 

Temperature Sensors

1. 57.3 F Basement air temp
2. 119.1 F H2O tank
3. 52.8 F Outdoors
4. 80.6 F Attic
5. 70.1 F Living Room
6. 52.1 F Oil burner ~ Basement floor temp


That oil burner temperature is at 52.1, because it's got an HX coil inside
that cools down the water-jacket (76 gallon), every time we use hotwater.

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f1...psb7b37684.jpg

So, the actual basement slab temp is about 52.1F, or ground water temp.
Since the current water table is only about 2 feet below the slab.

It's kinda nice to see it's warmer in the basement, than it is outdoors.. :D
We are moving in the right direction.. Towards a warm dry basement work shop!

Nice warm dry days :)
 

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1398170960
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1398171541
In the warmest part of the day, on the basement stairs it's HOT!
However, even if it's 80F on the stairs, the over-all basement temp
isn't going up that much..
But it is going up.. Yesterday it was 57F and this morning it's 57F..
That means the thermal mass is finally warming up..

The blowers are running a lot during the day and the Radon alarms
have stopped beeping. (High counts may have been caused by high water table).

Since the A7 (ASHP DHW heater) isn't dehumidifying the basement very much,
it's good to have warm dry air down there every sunny day.

The blowers are using a lot less power than a dehumidifier.

Basement Hit 70F today! Summer is here (I hope)!
 

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1401847021

At 22:00 it's cooling off and the rain is moving in.. (72% RH)

Temperature Sensors

1. 67.8 F Basement air temp
2. 129.7 F H2O tank
3. 64.9 F Outdoors
4. 77.5 F Attic
5. 76.2 F Living Room
6. 62.7 F Oil burner ~ Basement floor temp


It was great to see the air temp in the basement at 7.3 deg F higher than the ground water (slab) temp..
Actually very comfy down there today.
Radon level is low too..

Cool stuff. I just unplugged my attic heat fan last week due to warm enough ambient temps.

I want the basement to be warm, at least in the mid 70s. I want to keep it dry too.
Pumping down warm dry air is my goal for the summer.

But, trying to use the basement stairway as a duct isn't working real well.
Yesterday, the air at the top of the stairs was over 100F..
Not enough is being pulled downstairs into the basement.

If I had been able to install a 6" duct between attic and basement,
it would have worked a lot better than it is now.

Lately, I've been running a large floor fan during the sunny part of the day,
to blast the stairway with cool air from the basement.
That keeps it from getting too hot at the top of the stairs.

At least, I'm running the floor fan off solar PV power, so no money is going to NStar.. ;)

Summer changes
 

It was getting too hot in the back hall and in the low 70s in the basement.

Summer mode:
I've unplugged the attic blower and used the X10 to power the old
attic exhaust fan (it vents to the outdoors).

That old exhaust fan has it's own thermostat (on@120F & off@100).

So it's enabled by the CAI program (via X10), but might not run.
(If it's not hot enough in the attic).
The basement fan will still run whenever it's commanded by the program.

Today isn't very hot, so only the basement blower is running.

Xringer

In ref to fan noise....
I run 6 inch duct fans in my solar heated hot air collectors
My fans are outside but are piped in thru the side of my house and run along under the floor joists about 4 to 5 ft to the registers.

When first installed I ran 6 inch metal tubing insulated on the outside all the way to where the registers were located. When the fans kicked in the registers sounded like a tornado, just nuts so I tried something different.

I removed about 4 to 5ft of metal tubing from the register back toward the collectors and installed flexible 6 inch insulated duct hose in it's place... man what a difference.

99% of the noise went away

Is there a way you could move your fan back into your attic and install the insulated duct hose leading to your register? It may help big time.

Something else I would do is change over to 8 inch fan and ductwork.
Just my opinion.

I don't think the little 4 inch fan is capable of moving enough volume to your basement to accomplish your mission.

Just some thoughts.. I'm not an expert but a larger fan would most likely work less and move a heck of a lot more air.

...at my house:
I recently installed a new Navian Combi hot water Boiler in the laundry room here at our house. The new unit required 1 1/4 inch copper pipe manifold below the boiler and a whole bunch more additional copper piping around the boiler which is radiating tons of heat so our small laundry is now heating up in there pretty good much warmer then the rest of the house.

My plan is to do what you are doing and pump that warm air down to our basement.
I'm going to use an 8 inch fan and controller so it turns on/ off on it's own once installed.
I would love to use a 12v powered fan powered by a single panel solar panel but not sure I have the patience to put all that together. :-)
I have a pool table down there and would really love to be able to shoot pool without having to wear gloves. :-)

Use one of the Gargantuan computer case fans. 15 bucks for an 8 inch, moves somewhere around 100 CFM with a little back pressure. Sooper quiet, ultra low power, but they only produce a millimeter or two of pressure.

The other thing I do a lot is recycle broken dryer motors. They're all rated for 300-350 CFM through a long dryer hose. GE are short, Whirlpool are taller. Straight out a short pipe, they can do over 500 CFM. Made for massive pressure drop on either side (inlet suction or outlet back pressure). I've actually got a GE one rigged to preheat and/or precool my garage. It literally sucks air from the space above the drop ceiling in the basement.

This thread is not as old as me, but it's old!
 

I rarely use the attic fan these days. The basement is nice in the summer.
(Still use the basement fan, if the Radon gets too high).
We keep it dehumidified and the slab is cool enough that's it's comfortable down there. The attic fan could be moved upwards a few feet. Not enough to cut the noise much. (My wife dislikes the woody smell of hot attic air).
As for the winter, the slab is does most of the basement heating (~50F), so we try not to go down there without a jacket.
A small amount of additional heat down there comes from the oil burner runs, which are controlled by Alexa to minimize oil use.

Since my three 200 watt PV panels weren't doing anything, I hooked up that 600 watts to a resistive load to make a little heat. I think it runs about 500w in good sun. 1700 BTUh, that has very little effect on the basement, but it might be keeping the floor near my chair in the dinning room about 1/1024th of a degree warmer.. Maybe placebo effect heating. :)

Anyways, my wife and I are getting really old. I've got RA in my hands and feet so bad that I should be living in SW Texas, instead of north of Boston.
So going down to mess around in my shop or ham station, isn't what I want to do in the winter time.
I looked over all those posts, and found the heating numbers so low, they were depressing.
The only really successful thing about this project is the basement fan is great for removing Radon..

Cheers,
Rich