Scary Cabin

One of the issues with having an A-frame cabin is that there’s no attic and thus, little to no insulation between the upstairs ceiling and the roof. This makes it a challenge to heat/cool as it is always hot up there in the summer and cold in the winter. In terms of night-time comfort, summers are worse as it’s more difficult to remove the hot air as it naturally want to be there. Having a way to expel the hot air and pull in cool air from outside would be ideal and that’s exactly what a whole house fan does. However, pretty much every whole house fan you can find is designed to be installed in an attic. Because of that, the part of the fan assembly that would be in the attic is not pretty and not designed to be exposed to the elements. We have no attic. Tamarack Technologies to the rescue. They make one whole house fan that is designed to be roof or wall mounted. The TC1000-H. And it is even available in brown so it blends in with the building exterior. The one downside is that it’s expensive. Like 2 to 3 times more expensive than your run of the mill whole house fan. This weekend we installed the TC1000-H in the front wall of the upstairs bedroom. It fits nicely in the triangle area above the balcony door. The installation wasn’t difficult, just a bit time consuming. Build some framing, cut a hole in the wall, mount the fan. Previously, there was a light up there so just replacing the switch and wiring make simple work of the electrical.

Everything seems to be working as designed, but is it effective? It probably is helping to pull hot air that is trapped in the peak of that room, but it really doesn’t pull much air from other parts of the house. In our main home we have a whole house fan and when it’s on, you can feel a nice strong breeze through the open windows. With the TC1000-H, there does not seem to be an additional breeze. Prior to this we were using a box fan in the window to force some of the cooler outside air in. But we’ve only tried this for one night and one day. With it running all day, the upstairs didn’t seem to get as warm and more closely tracked the outside temp. Previously, the upstairs seemed to get 4-5 degrees hotter than outside. We need some more data.

We started putting up sheetrock in the bathroom and bedroom. If you remember from previous entries, we can’t fit a full 4×8 sheet of sheetrock up the stairway. Thus, we had to measure, go down stairs (on the deck), cut to size, and then carry the cut pieces upstairs. So far we’ve got a lot of the inside bathroom walls done and a few pieces of the master bedroom walls. We’re a bit limited by lack of insulation. We need more for the outside walls and we want to insulate the bathroom for sound. But, getting the Roxul insulation has proved more challenging this year. It’s on-order and we might have it before Labor Day.

We also framed a niche in the bathroom to add some additional storage space and finished running the electrical to the bathroom.