Summary: To help keep you attic cool, you need large volume of air moved around by your attic ventilation. The air can be moved with the help of turbine roof vents or fans. But then the powered attic fan will also draw out the air-conditioned air.
Question: The afternoon sun blazes into the garage, which is attached to my home. The temperature peaks to about 110 degrees during hot summer days. There are two bedrooms above the garage in the attic space. This along with the front half portion of the garage warms up during summer. Should we go for a garage door that is insulated to make sure that the garage is cooler? Or can a part of the hot air be removed from the garage? There is a roll-down screen. However this is not helping to keep off the heat.
Answer: It is not surprising that your garage feels like an oven. The temperature rises up throughout the day peaking from 4 to 5 p.m. The direct sunrays beat down heavily to cook up everything in its path and that includes your garage as well as all the things inside it. Your situation could be worse.
If any cars that have been driven on the road are parked inside the garage, then there is this additional heat. The mechanical parts of the car become quite hot in summer months with just 10 or may be 15 minutes of driving. Some parts as the disc-brake rotors could easily be more than 250 F. once parked inside the garage, heat from the car is radiated for hours into the garage.
A garage door that is insulated does not help in such cases. When the garage door is closed, the heat is simply trapped inside the garage, which is what you don’t want. Of course, the insulated door can be useful during the remaining parts of the year other than summer.
The objects inside the garage also absorb heat and radiate it just as your car radiates heat. It is something like a campfire when its dying embers as well as any rocks that may be around it remains hot and radiates heat even after the flames have gone off. The heat continues to be radiated for hours. You can feel the low-level infrared heat in the garage even the next day early in the morning.
I should know for I too experience what happens to my own garage in summer months. When I enter the garage in the morning, the temperature of the interior-garage is warmer by some 10 to 15 F than the temperature outside. This is in spite of the fact that the walls and ceiling of my garage are insulated well.
The attic space and if there are any finished rooms above will be warmer as a result of the heat trapped inside the garage. Is the ceiling cavity between the finished spaces and the garage insulated in your garage? If it is not insulated, then you may think of an additional blown-in insulation.
You may effectively cool the inside of your garage by installing one or possibly two sidewall ventilation fans that are powerful. There is a wide variety of fans that are available to assist you to suck in the air from inside the garage and to exhaust it outside. But then do not expect that these fans can at all lessen the temperature inside the garage lower than that outside. The temperature inside the garage will be more than 90F when the temperature outside is 90F at around 5 or 6 p.m.
For the fans to work to do its job, copious air is required to feed the fans. This means that the door of the garage should be kept about 4 inches above the floor so that air flows indoors from outside through this gap. Cooling is the most effective if the fans are located opposite the door of the garage high up on the wall.
The stream of air will feel cool if you place yourself in its way. The evaporation of your perspiration from your skin rapidly extracts your body heat making your body cool. But this will not be the case with the stuffs in the garage as these inanimate objects takes a longer time to lose the heat as they do not sweat. The running of the fans can also be regulated with a timer, which permits the fan to run for a specific time period. A thermostat can also be used to make sure that the fan will run between two preset settings.
If you want a noticeable cooling effect, you need to get ventilation fans which are capable of exhausting thousands of cubic feet every minute. These types of fan are easy to get and the Internet can assist you to access them. Check the price. It costs more for fans that is fitted with motors of high quality, blades that are well-balanced and good self-closing louvers, which are weatherproof. I advise you buy a fan at as high a cost as you can afford.
The specification for electrical wiring of the fans should be accord to its code. You need to make sure of this. May be you might have to go in for installation of a new circuit or two when your fan is a large one. A substantial amount of electricity will be drawn by the fan. If one is not careful this could overload the circuits.
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