5 ms·
I've spent many hours navigating the air purifier market and it is one of the most opaque and customer-unfriendly ones I have ever seen. Beyond the advice given
by Bakary 6y ago
I've spent many hours navigating the air purifier market and it is one of the most opaque and customer-unfriendly ones I have ever seen. Beyond the advice given in the article, it's also important to check what the filter exactly is. Some filters are washable, but it often means that they are not as thorough as HEPA filters, which is a big deal if your goal is to avoid the dreaded PM2.5 that are as far as I can tell the main threat to health and the pursuit of happiness.
A more general problem is that there is a conceptual contradiction between low noise and high filtering. It will be difficult for a silent filter to be quick at filtering your room.
The good news is that even a relatively crappy, low CADR setup can still filter a bedroom over time so long as it remains closed. You will however be paying for replacements more often and it might not be worth it if you have to ventilate daily and the filter takes many hours to give you a clean environment.
I like the work that Smart Air China is doing. I am not affiliated with them, but they have essentially done and made available the same sort of research as the one highlighted in the article and have long promoted the no bullshit use of a simple box fan with filter combo for lower income and highly polluted regions.
- ahaucnx 6y agoYes I agree. There are a lot of non or low performing units out there that are hyped up by marketing and dubious claims. My startup [1] does air quality measurements primarily for schools and we very often come across schools that wasted a lot of money purchasing non performing units. The best is really to get a PM2.5 meter and compare the performance of different units. [1] https://www.airgradient.com/schools/ https://www.airgradient.com/schools/
- float4 6y agoBetween a lot of nonsense I've read today, I suddenly read a comment from someone who devotes energy to making air in schools cleaner. Very refreshing. Good luck with your startup.
- technics256 6y agoWhat about something like VOCs? Important also or?
- dmix 6y agoAre there consumer tier air monitors for home use worth using? Also great startup idea. This will have long term demand. IDK if targeting (public) schools and their gov acquisition processes is wise but definitely a need there and probably plenty of new budgets for this stuff. Btw your mobile marketing site could use some work. The spacing is off in a WebKit browser.
- owenversteeg 6y agoI completely agree. Recently purchased an air filter and it was a ridiculous amount of work to find a quality product. Even the supposedly data driven blogs didn't post the lower cost options, probably because of affiliate revenues on the high end models. Besides the PM2.5 aspect (which, as far as I can tell, can be solved by pushing a large volume of air through a HEPA filter), there's also the quality and type of the carbon filter, which is what traps a number of other things such as VOCs and most scents. You also need to know the type of thing you're filtering - smoke, for example, you really need a carbon filter for, and if you really want to filter a decent quantity of smoke, you'll need to drastically oversize the filter (e.x. Get a large industrial filter for a small area.) In case anyone's curious what I got, I didn't need to filter smoke, so I got one of the larger Levoit filters and used it in a small room, and I'm happy so far.
- andbberger 6y agonot to mention that it's almost impossible to buy actual bonafide HEPA filters from consumer facing vendors. True HEPA? Nope that's marketing speak for something else
- m463 6y agoSort of like water filters.