Corby Hicks, our friend over at Verdantly, recently completed an interesting energy-efficient home-improvement project – installing a solar-powered crawl space ventilation system. Even better, he details the entire DIY project on his blog at Verdantly.
Corby decided that a fan would increase the ventilation offered by existing passive vents in the foundation, thereby improving the energy efficiency of his home:
“It’s just important to make sure the crawl space is not a source of energy inefficiency. Ours has a number of problems. I decided that improving ventilation was good starting point after doing some reading on the subject. … So, I came up with something I consider to be more of a sustainable design… a simple DIY solar crawl space fan that could be mounted outside the crawl space with very little additional prep work.”
He built a weather-proof housing for a large computer fan, placed it over one of the vents, and sealed up all of the gaps. From there, he opted to power the fan with a Voltaic 16.8-Watt panel mounted on a frame he had built largely from scrap materials. After placing it on the roof, all that he needed to do was run lines for solar power to the fan and let it whir up.
All in all, it’s definitely a creative and efficient solution to a common problem, and we’re happy that it’s all being powered using solar energy collected by one of our panels. Thanks, Corby.
Hi. I’m new to Solar and unfamiliar with the engineering and calculations required to determine which parts to buy.
I’d like to adapt this installation slightly to ventilate a dog house. The adaptation I’m considering will add one of the batteries to power the fan throughout the night.
Will you please let me know which Voltaic parts I’ll need? I have a very sunny, southwest facing area in South Eastern PA and want to use a large computer fan like the one pictured.
Thank you!
Hi Steve,
Anyway that you could get a fan that runs off USB? I think you could do something like 3 x 3.4 Watt panels going into our V39 Battery. We have a way to switch the battery into “Always On” Mode which would allow it to run continuously (and start back up again if the battery runs out of juice).
See
https://www.voltaicsystems.com/10wattkit.php (to charge the V39 you want the circuit box set to 6V).
https://www.voltaicsystems.com/alwayson
So how is it performing?