Deciding Your Clear Expectations For Home Air Purifiers
What You Need To Do
Establish
your own clean air standard for the air purifiers you're considering.
Why? Because your desired health benefit depends on how clean you can
make your air, and the cleaner the better.
Allow me to share the next steps to finding the right air cleaner:
Determine your personal standard for the clean air you need
Discover which types of air purifiers may meet your standard
By
understanding "clean air" and how different air cleaners perform you'll
easily eliminate poor quality air purifiers from consideration. I'll show you how...
Because it keeps you intent on your real goal, helping you continually ask, "Will this air purifier really work for me?"
Keeping your purpose clear in mind is essential to finding the one best air cleaner for your family.
Would you like to add some extra benefits to expect from your air purifier? Consider the following list...
What should clean air do for you?
Reduce your exposure to allergens, irritants, illnesses, odors, and chemical toxins
Help reduce symptoms and control asthma, allergies, COPD, MCS and improve your overall well being
Help you reduce dependency on medication and help you avoid undesirable side effects
Help you enjoy your home life to the full, increasing wellness and enabling you to do more of the things that make you happy
You
don't need a PhD to choose an air cleaner that will give you these
benefits. All you need to know is a few simple "golden rules".
What do I really need to know about air cleaning? And keep it simple!
Here are the basic facts:
All air contaminants are either irritants, allergens, infectious or a combination of these. To clean your air you must remove:
Irritants:
Smoke
Chemical fumes
Perfume
Strong odors
Cooking fumes
Dust
Allergens:
Pollen
Mold
Animal dander
Cockroach allergens
Dust mites
Infectious agents:
Bacteria and viruses
Colds
Flu
Bronchitis
Chest infection
Regardless of your primary health concern, your clean air benefits depend on your removing all contaminants.
Why?
Because
health problems related to irritants, like asthma or COPD, are made
worse by allergens. Likewise, allergies are made worse by irritants.
And everyone is at risk where infectious agents are present.
What are the keys to controlling them?
You only need to know about two relevant features for all air pollutants:
Their size
Their quantity
You may thus judge air cleaners by two basic features:
Particle size removed
Efficiency, the quantity removed
Here is everything you need to know about airborne particles:
Particles in the air range from .005 micron to 100 microns.
Anything
larger than 10 micron settles out rather quickly, too quickly to be
affected by air purification in any meaningful way. But if it settles
out, you're not breathing it, right?
Particles from 10 micron down to 2.5 micron deposit in the nose and throat where they cause sinus irritation and allergies.
Most Important: Particles
smaller than 2.5 micron are lung penetrating particles. These are the
most toxic and damaging to health, particularly those below 0.1 micron,
whether you're healthy or suffering a chronic respiratory condition.
These particles are the ones linked to increased heart disease, heart
attack and stroke.
How can I use these basic facts about air pollutants to compare air purifiers?
Further discussion of the abilities of different types of air purifiers will follow in our next step.
For
now, let us say this: There are hundreds, even thousands, of air
cleaners being thrust upon consumers like yourself by marketers. All
make their own bold claims and promises.
But you will be in a position to quickly dismiss the vast majority as unworthy of further consideration.
How?
You already know that the most significant particles you need to concern yourself with are those less than 2.5 micron.
I'll
be generous at this point and say that all air cleaners do a reasonably
good job of removing particles in the 2.5 to 10 micron range. But that
isn't the clean air standard that will give you the specific health
benefits we've talked so much about.
The most significant benefit
to your immediate and long term health results from removing these
smallest micron and sub-micron particles. Let this become your own
clean air standard.
Now that you have a clear performance
expectation of your home air cleaner I'd like to invite you to continue
our discussion with the next important step - Comparing different types of air purifiers.