Saturday, July 10, 2010

Integrated Window Fans

Fans are a much more energy efficient way to 'cool' your home than AC. The problem is that fans do not actually cool and only circulate the air. If you have a fair number of fans though you can get a pretty good affect. But then you have fans everywhere.

Now what if each of the windows in your home could act like a full box fan. It could probably do a pretty good job of keeping your home cool without resorting to the AC.

Now if you are not heard of Dyson's new blade-less fans, you may wish to take a minute to check out this link: http://www.dyson.com/fans/. The gist of it is they are fans without blades. Appearance wise they look like just the frame to a traditional fan.

Now imagine one of these in a rectangular shape that could fit in your window. It would be fairly unobtrusive. But lets take it a step further.

Say a house is under construction. Imagine the window frames themselves are built to be the fan frames. The blower motor could be inside the wall and wired directly to the homes electrical system. The system could be designed to engage when the window is opened.

To a casual inspection the window would look like any other window. Closer inspection would reveal groves designed to be aerodynamic and create air flow. Each window would basically be capable of generating its own powerful energy efficient breeze when opened.

Now this type of blade-less design relies on aerodynamics. It may be difficult maintaining the required shape while distorting it to fit into a window and also function as a traditional window frame.

The other issue is that these blade-less fans are absurdly expensive. Now this could just be how they are pricing them, or it could actually cost that much for them to make. At the current price it would likely hamper adoption into all window frames in a home.

However, I could see this becoming a popular trend some years in the future. And if Dyson isn't all ready working on a 'box' fan version at the very least, they should be.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Have comments about my ideas? If you see something wrong with them, leave a comment. I'll try to comment back. If you have seen these ideas implemented/mentioned somewhere before, leave a comment. I like to think I am 'original' but that doesn't mean somebody has not beaten me to the punch. Finally, if you just have something to say, well comment that as well.