My parents purchased our Dell Avenue home in Sarnia in 1965, ten years after they married. I was nine at the time. I haven’t set foot in this house since 1979, when it was sold again, but I can still picture it and walk through it in my mind. It was a back split — three levels with a crawlspace, and later with an addition off the back that my dad built. Its only noteworthy feature was the living room’s cathedral ceiling and the opening onto the upstairs hallway that it allowed.

At the end of this hallway, on the opposite end from the master bedroom, was the door to the linen closet — a typical feature in very many homes. I imagine now, after a career in home renovation, that our house had been built with an attic hatch in this closet, but I don’t remember ever poking my head through. Somewhere along the line of our sojourn there, this attic hatch was fitted with a fan.

Now, Sarnia could get hot in the summer back then — hence the lake. It is not my impression that things are hotter now, but lifelong Sarnians may beg to differ. Anyway, air conditioning was relatively rare then, and we suffered the heat stoically, following in the footsteps of generations who came before. The half sunken basement level (a rec room and a bedroom) was a bit cooler, so sometimes we all slept there on those nights when the heat and the humidity hung unbearably in the air.

I know very well now what that fan in the attic hatch was for, but I have no idea when I came to know it. The fan sucked hot air from the house and blew it into the attic. This created some air movement in the house (a relief in itself when there is no breeze) and it drew outside air into the house, which typically got cooler as the night progressed.

I have never come across this feature in any home not my own — and I’ve visited and worked in many. Where my dad got the idea, I know not. But he was an inventive and handy man so I take this accomplishment for granted. I do not recall ever talking to him about it, or having it explained to me, but I also do not doubt that I understood what was going on when the linen closet door was left open and the fan was running.

Some twenty years later I bought my first home in St. Catharines — a story and a half, no basement, with kitchen, bathroom and laundry room off the back. It was not long before I installed my own whole house fan. I cut through the back wall of the upstairs back bedroom, into the attic over the kitchen, and installed a squirrel cage fan, previously used in some furnace, and acquired for very little money.

This served us well for the thirteen years we lived there. That home never got central air during the whole of its eighty year lifespan, though we did put a window unit in the front porch office fairly early on. What my dad thought of his copy cat son, I have no idea. Again, I can’t recall ever talking with him about it.

Then we got bought out by developers, and parlayed our modest WWI house into a two and a half story, with basement, WWII house. I immediately installed the now twice reclaimed furnace fan in the attic (to which I had built stairs), but this time vented it through louvres in the gable end to the outdoors. And it got even more sophisticated than that. I wired in a relay with a regular baseboard heater thermostat to turn the fan on when the attic got hot, pulling fresh air in through the soffit vents. And I put an override switch within easy reach at the bottom of the stairs to the attic for when I wanted some night action.

There’s a central AC box by my driveway, with its vinyl cover now undisturbed for the past twenty-five years, serving nicely as a waystation for loading tools into my van. It struggled vainly for the first couple of years, on a sixty amp service, before giving it up altogether. So we have continued the use of window units — a large one at the top of the stairs and a small one in the kitchen/dining room. They get installed well after our neighbours start running their set-and-forget central air systems. So far, this year, they’ve only been on for a few hours (what a lovely June we’re having).

The summer shoulder seasons generally have cool nights when the days get hot. The house is insulated well enough that the temperature only creeps up during the day to mid twenties, which is quite bearable. We look at the forecast and, if the next day promises to be hot again, I go through the familiar routine of opening up windows, opening the door to the attic (originally to the linen closet) and then the back attic door (between finished and unfinished), before switching on the fan. I always enjoy the palpable press of air coming up through the attic door as I descend the stairs.

That done, there’s an immediate cooling effect from the now moving air, and by morning the house temperature has dropped again — to within a couple of degrees of the lowest nighttime temperature. Then, before it can go up again, I reverse the routine and close everything up. Sometimes, when I know the outside temperature will stay in the low twenties, I’ll leave it going the whole day. It’s lovely to have the outdoors in like that.

This has its limits, of course, during a heat wave. Even when the night temperature drops, running the whole house fan can make the whole house humid. So there are times when we keep things closed up and depend on AC. Even then we will run the AC at night (between 7 and 7) to avoid time-of-use pricing gouging. But we’re not so austere that we won’t turn on the kitchen unit for a bit during lunch or supper.

Our income is low enough that we benefit from the energy cost savings, but I do this mainly out of principle. Running central air at full tilt is inconsistent with climate change angst (churches are the worst). And I consider modest living a badge of honour, even when it’s necessary. But even more, I’d rather be in tune with my (natural) environment — adapting to it rather than defeating it with HVAC extravagances.

I can appreciate the satisfaction of coming inside from the heat, and immediately experiencing a frisson of cool air wherever you go in your home. But too cold is too much, and I regularly enjoy my cool refuge anyway, without having used AC. Even when the heat wave is unstoppable, I consider that “when it’s summer, let it be summer.” Civilizations have endured weather extremes forever — we shouldn’t lose touch with that.

My whole house fan cost me very little. The motor just keeps going and I’ve replaced the belt only once. Out of doors, the neighbour’s black walnut that fully shaded our backyard has been cut down, but we’ve invested in a couple of inexpensive shade sails to compensate. Two spindly trees planted a dozen years ago, street-side, have become shade behemoths all on their own, if only to keep parked cars cool. And the beach still beckons after sixty years — once free but now still only $15 a year for parking.

A corollary to ‘living in the moment’ is ‘living in place’. This is not the motto of Angelenos, those millions who gobble up water and hydro not their own. But Los Angeles seems to have summer night temperatures of 14°C to 17°C, so I wonder if they’ve experimented with whole house fans. And every time I’ve worshipped at Neland Avenue Church in GR, I’ve wondered about the efficacy, in that particular place, of power venting the surplus of Midwestern hot air that wafts up naturally into its cupola.

I quite like my place in south-western Ontario with its seasonal moments of hot and cold and in between. I like to think my enjoyment is on par with the original Attawandaron and Wendat people, with early European settlers and with later arrivals like my own family in 1953 — all of whom conditioned themselves and their environment as best they could without AC.

Whole house fans should be part of holistic building solutions in an age when the excess of AI data centers and super-cooled homes feeds our addiction to virtual realities at the expense of created reality.