Earlier this year, I rewired my basement to create individual circuits for my garage and office. Before, the entire basement (including the garage) was all on one circuit. I decided I was tired of having my network go down every time I would trip a breaker in the garage – which, admittedly, happens all too frequently. I tinker in that realm as well, but I digress. Now, my office, garage, and the rest of the basement are each on their own independent circuit.
When I made this change, I installed an inductive monitoring device to monitor the power draw of my office. I have found that my office is usually drawing between 650-750 watts. I’m not proud of it, but that’s the figure.
I knew I had an issue with my office warming up throughout the day, but I had figured my power consumption was about half of what it turned out to be. To help remediate this, I installed a larger vent off the trunk of the HVAC plenum and added a larger return air vent. This helped quite a bit, but in seasons where the HVAC isn’t running as much, convection just doesn’t seem to do the trick. I need active movement of air.
So, I decided (yet again) to take matters into my own hands, and took to the drawing board. I had a lot of the components already on hand to build a thermostatically-controlled set of fans to force air out of the return vent. I used a W1209WK thermostatic controller, ASUS XF120 fans – spec’d because of their mag-lev bearings that make them very quiet and provide a 400,000 hour lifespan, a 12v power supply, a DIY start-up capacitor bank, and for safety, a couple of fuses to account for the different failure modes of components.
Here is what I built:
