09-24-2017, 01:04 AM
First off, A fantastik fan, or a Maxxxair fan on the roof exhausting hot air from the ceiling and an open window to allow for fresh air entry is awesome. Pretty hard to beat.
I did not choose this path back in 2001 when i got my Van. I chose a 4 inch mushroom type of vent made for boats. It had its own tiny solar panel, and a C size 1.2v Nicad battery to run at night. It moved an Unimpressive 1000 cubic feet per hour. At the time it was adequate for keeping the traction wax from melting off the surfboards strapped to my ceiling, but not much more.
I really liked how rain was not a factor with this vent, stubbornly did not want to upgrade to a 14 inch square roof vent like fantstik or Maxairr, and decided instead to increase airflow through this small mushroom vent
Now that mushroom vent's fan motor and battery have been gutted to reduce restriction, and two counter rotating adjustable speed 120Mm computer fans force a fairly good volume of air out my roof through this vent at a maximum draw of 0.55 amps, and as low as 0.09 amps.
These exhaust fans are assisted by upto 3 intake fans I have mounted in a shroud on a screened/ chickenwired conversion van sliding window.
Two of the fans I now have in this intake shroud are basically Why I am starting this thread, as they are new products I wish to share with you all, as they have dramatically increased my ability to exchange the air in my van, while also lowering the amp draw required to do so.
Noctua pretty much make the top quality computer fans, and they are known for being quiet and efficient at their job, but none of them were particularly powerful fans, until fairly recently.
Noctua has come out with industrial versions of their best fans, and these can spin as high as 3000 rpm. These fans are IP52 rated, ingress protection, against water and dust. The higher the numbers the better the protection. Some of their 24v fans are IP67 rated, basically waterproof. I've had a lot of intake fan failures due to corrosion/ moisture over the years.
Anyway, I just got two of these fans:
http://noctua.at/en/products/product-lin...c-3000-pwm
About 25$ each on Amazon. At 3000 rpm they are loud, they are powerful, and they only draw 0.3 amps at 3000 rpm. Many other fans that can move this much air, draw 2 to 3 times as much electricity and make more noise doing so, and can only do so when there is no restrictions to airflow present infront of or behind the fan.
So they are loud at top speed, but Noctua now also makes a speed controller for about 20 $. this speed controller:
http://noctua.at/en/products/accessories/na-fc1
This controller comes with splitter cables, some extension cables. it is designed to plug into a SATA connection on a computer motherboard, but this connector just has a yellow and a black wire running to it. Yellow is + black is -
Hook the yellow wire to your fuse block, the black wire to your battery - buss bar or similar, and one can plug 3 fans easily into this small speed controller via the provided cabling, and the rpm range of the 3000 rpm fans is now somewhere about 300 rpm (and basically completely silent) to 3000 rpm and quite loud.
This controller will properly control just about any 4 wire PWM fan, and many of them at the same time. PWM is pulse width modulation and PWM fans have a fourth wire so that the computer motherboard can control the speed of the fan according to need. This controller allows us van dwellers to simply control a very powerful efficient fan to just about any speed desired/required at the spin of a dial.
I bought two of these fans expecting to put one on my ceiling, with the counter rotating pusher fan to assist it, and one on my 3 fan intake shroud. An experiment revealed the Noctua fan DID NOT like the pusher fan trying to help it, so both of these fans wound up on my intake shroud next to a 180MM Silverstone Fm181 fan and suck air through a screen on one of those sliding window conversion van windows. Each of the three fans is individually switched, the SS FM181 comes with its own speed controller( 0.09 to 0.29 amps) upto 165 CFM, the Noctua fans are rated at 110CFM at 3000 rpm, but one computer nerd site measured them at 135CFM( cubic feet per minute)
So all three intake fans at top speed, draw less than 0.9 amps, and if there were not restrictions to airflow caused by the screen behind them, would push 385 cubic feet per minute into the van. My roof exhaust can basically only do about 150 CFM, so if I have a door cracked and all my fans on high, there is air forcefully flowing out the cracked door. A rough calculation of my vans interior volume is 550 cubic feet so these 3 fans on high, on their own, should be able to replace the entire volume of air in the van about once in less than 2 minutes.
I do not know if the computer fan is a possible solution/ air movement aide for the reader here, but these Noctua fans are pretty awesome. now that they have these industrial 3000 rpm versions and a Easy peazy PWM speed controller hook up it makes them even more awesome.
No they are not cheap, The Newb looking for a roof vent would be better off with a 14 inch MAxair or fantastick fan from the get go.
My intake fan shroud basically resides by my head when in bed. I can turn all three of these fans on slow speed and basically not hear them. If I sleep late I can spin a dial and increase their airflow as it warms up.
What had been really surprising with these Noctua fans, is when i put black carbon filter on the exterior of the window, this filter restriction with previous fans reduced airflow by at least 2/3, but these noctua's flow is reduced by less than 1/4. The Filter is nice but also blocks light from getting in or out. iT sticks nicely to velcro and stays put at highway speeds.
Here is a link to the Noctua fans. they need to be the PWM version ( NOt the FLX version) to work with the Noctua speed controller:
https://www.amazon.com/Focused-NF-F12-iP...a+3000+rpm
Here is the Noctua speed controller:
https://www.amazon.com/Noctua-NA-FC1-4-p...ctua+a+fc1
Here is the Silverstone 180MM fm181 fan that comes with its own speed controller:
https://www.amazon.com/SilverStone-perfo...tone+FM181
These 3 fans on my intake shroud make me happy, I've had theSS Fm181 there for a while and two other 120MM fans, but the Industrial Noctua fans on speed control are so so much better.
One can also wire up their own PWM signal generator and feed the 4th blue wire a pwm signal and control fan speed this way. I have done this, sucessfully, but honestly the Noctua speed controller is many fold superior and easier and basically notany more expensive than the components for making ones own PWM signal generator.
I'll come back with some pics in a later post in this thread showing my intake shroud, and my counter rotating roof vent, and the disgustingly powerful fan I Use for interior air circulation mounted on a gooseneck and how I speed control this fan.
The Homemade PWM signal generator requires a voltage bucker to feed the PWM generator 5 volts, and these together are basically 3x as big as the noctua Speed controller and much less efficient. The PWm generator has a tiny potentiometer requiring jewleers screwdriver that controls the PWM signal which controls fan speed. While it is not that difficult to remove this tiny potentiometer from teh circuit board and wire up a more ergonomic larger fingertwist potentiometer, well the Noctua controller is basically plug and play, but I will, in a later post in this thread show what I know about rigging up a homemade PWM signal generator to control these computer PWM fan speeds, but I recommend against bothering in favor of Noctua's speed controller, which will control just about any PWM computer fan, and many of them at the same time.
I did not choose this path back in 2001 when i got my Van. I chose a 4 inch mushroom type of vent made for boats. It had its own tiny solar panel, and a C size 1.2v Nicad battery to run at night. It moved an Unimpressive 1000 cubic feet per hour. At the time it was adequate for keeping the traction wax from melting off the surfboards strapped to my ceiling, but not much more.
I really liked how rain was not a factor with this vent, stubbornly did not want to upgrade to a 14 inch square roof vent like fantstik or Maxairr, and decided instead to increase airflow through this small mushroom vent
Now that mushroom vent's fan motor and battery have been gutted to reduce restriction, and two counter rotating adjustable speed 120Mm computer fans force a fairly good volume of air out my roof through this vent at a maximum draw of 0.55 amps, and as low as 0.09 amps.
These exhaust fans are assisted by upto 3 intake fans I have mounted in a shroud on a screened/ chickenwired conversion van sliding window.
Two of the fans I now have in this intake shroud are basically Why I am starting this thread, as they are new products I wish to share with you all, as they have dramatically increased my ability to exchange the air in my van, while also lowering the amp draw required to do so.
Noctua pretty much make the top quality computer fans, and they are known for being quiet and efficient at their job, but none of them were particularly powerful fans, until fairly recently.
Noctua has come out with industrial versions of their best fans, and these can spin as high as 3000 rpm. These fans are IP52 rated, ingress protection, against water and dust. The higher the numbers the better the protection. Some of their 24v fans are IP67 rated, basically waterproof. I've had a lot of intake fan failures due to corrosion/ moisture over the years.
Anyway, I just got two of these fans:
http://noctua.at/en/products/product-lin...c-3000-pwm
About 25$ each on Amazon. At 3000 rpm they are loud, they are powerful, and they only draw 0.3 amps at 3000 rpm. Many other fans that can move this much air, draw 2 to 3 times as much electricity and make more noise doing so, and can only do so when there is no restrictions to airflow present infront of or behind the fan.
So they are loud at top speed, but Noctua now also makes a speed controller for about 20 $. this speed controller:
http://noctua.at/en/products/accessories/na-fc1
This controller comes with splitter cables, some extension cables. it is designed to plug into a SATA connection on a computer motherboard, but this connector just has a yellow and a black wire running to it. Yellow is + black is -
Hook the yellow wire to your fuse block, the black wire to your battery - buss bar or similar, and one can plug 3 fans easily into this small speed controller via the provided cabling, and the rpm range of the 3000 rpm fans is now somewhere about 300 rpm (and basically completely silent) to 3000 rpm and quite loud.
This controller will properly control just about any 4 wire PWM fan, and many of them at the same time. PWM is pulse width modulation and PWM fans have a fourth wire so that the computer motherboard can control the speed of the fan according to need. This controller allows us van dwellers to simply control a very powerful efficient fan to just about any speed desired/required at the spin of a dial.
I bought two of these fans expecting to put one on my ceiling, with the counter rotating pusher fan to assist it, and one on my 3 fan intake shroud. An experiment revealed the Noctua fan DID NOT like the pusher fan trying to help it, so both of these fans wound up on my intake shroud next to a 180MM Silverstone Fm181 fan and suck air through a screen on one of those sliding window conversion van windows. Each of the three fans is individually switched, the SS FM181 comes with its own speed controller( 0.09 to 0.29 amps) upto 165 CFM, the Noctua fans are rated at 110CFM at 3000 rpm, but one computer nerd site measured them at 135CFM( cubic feet per minute)
So all three intake fans at top speed, draw less than 0.9 amps, and if there were not restrictions to airflow caused by the screen behind them, would push 385 cubic feet per minute into the van. My roof exhaust can basically only do about 150 CFM, so if I have a door cracked and all my fans on high, there is air forcefully flowing out the cracked door. A rough calculation of my vans interior volume is 550 cubic feet so these 3 fans on high, on their own, should be able to replace the entire volume of air in the van about once in less than 2 minutes.
I do not know if the computer fan is a possible solution/ air movement aide for the reader here, but these Noctua fans are pretty awesome. now that they have these industrial 3000 rpm versions and a Easy peazy PWM speed controller hook up it makes them even more awesome.
No they are not cheap, The Newb looking for a roof vent would be better off with a 14 inch MAxair or fantastick fan from the get go.
My intake fan shroud basically resides by my head when in bed. I can turn all three of these fans on slow speed and basically not hear them. If I sleep late I can spin a dial and increase their airflow as it warms up.
What had been really surprising with these Noctua fans, is when i put black carbon filter on the exterior of the window, this filter restriction with previous fans reduced airflow by at least 2/3, but these noctua's flow is reduced by less than 1/4. The Filter is nice but also blocks light from getting in or out. iT sticks nicely to velcro and stays put at highway speeds.
Here is a link to the Noctua fans. they need to be the PWM version ( NOt the FLX version) to work with the Noctua speed controller:
https://www.amazon.com/Focused-NF-F12-iP...a+3000+rpm
Here is the Noctua speed controller:
https://www.amazon.com/Noctua-NA-FC1-4-p...ctua+a+fc1
Here is the Silverstone 180MM fm181 fan that comes with its own speed controller:
https://www.amazon.com/SilverStone-perfo...tone+FM181
These 3 fans on my intake shroud make me happy, I've had theSS Fm181 there for a while and two other 120MM fans, but the Industrial Noctua fans on speed control are so so much better.
One can also wire up their own PWM signal generator and feed the 4th blue wire a pwm signal and control fan speed this way. I have done this, sucessfully, but honestly the Noctua speed controller is many fold superior and easier and basically notany more expensive than the components for making ones own PWM signal generator.
I'll come back with some pics in a later post in this thread showing my intake shroud, and my counter rotating roof vent, and the disgustingly powerful fan I Use for interior air circulation mounted on a gooseneck and how I speed control this fan.
The Homemade PWM signal generator requires a voltage bucker to feed the PWM generator 5 volts, and these together are basically 3x as big as the noctua Speed controller and much less efficient. The PWm generator has a tiny potentiometer requiring jewleers screwdriver that controls the PWM signal which controls fan speed. While it is not that difficult to remove this tiny potentiometer from teh circuit board and wire up a more ergonomic larger fingertwist potentiometer, well the Noctua controller is basically plug and play, but I will, in a later post in this thread show what I know about rigging up a homemade PWM signal generator to control these computer PWM fan speeds, but I recommend against bothering in favor of Noctua's speed controller, which will control just about any PWM computer fan, and many of them at the same time.