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Curious About Indoor Air Quality?
Ricky Ng-Adam asks: "The Science Advisory Board of the EPA has 'consistently ranked indoor air pollution among the top five environmental risks to public health'. As most of you are probably spending most of your time indoors like myself, I'd like to know how this affects you and what do you do to deal with it? Is it worth it to buy an air purifier and if so which one?" Also, how well do purifiers deal with common indoor air polution, like smoking...and pet hair/dander (for those of you who spend lots of time working at home)?
Wow, first of all I must share my excitement: this is the first time ever one of my article get posted (even if it is only on Ask Slashdot!).
Seriously now, I originally began researching the subject because I live in a downtown appartment and the building is so badly built that we smell the cigarette smoke from adjacent rooms.
Once I got to the EPA information however, it kind of made me think about how (bad) air quality could affect my overall health, particularly my sleep.
After all, I have a Brita water filter - but nothing to purify the air.
I shopped around and discovered that good air purifiers are very expensive: I think I'd go for either the Austin Air or Blue Air which are both around 400$US.
But who knows: are they really worth that price? Are they any good? It's difficult to know what's bullshit and what's good in those kind of things. Objective reviews on the net are rare and snake oil quite frequent.
I kind of trusted Allergy Buyers Club until I discovered that the guy behind it kept spamming Usenet pretty badly.
Aren't ionizers bad for your health?
Of course, there's always the popular conspiracy theory!
But I'd be interested in hearing what particular air filter you've used... Do you think they are all the same (ie: ineffective)?
Sorry, I kind of jumped the gun on that one... Of course, I thought you meant ozone generator, not ionizer.
;-).
From what I've read, negative ions could be good for your health (although there doesn't seem to be any study on it). It's just that they tend to be bundled with ozone generators, that's why I posted this
As for cleaning ability, doesn't it create a fine dust that gets all over the floor? Must be troublesome to clean!
is quite "leaky" when it comes to air. I really don't have to worry about this problem too much. Heating it is a bitch, though. :-)
My furnace has an electrostatic air cleaner which keeps most of the dirt, pollen and light hair from getting recycled over and over, but I like to keep my furnace fan on all the time just to keep the air moving so this works 24/7. If you've got smokers your problem is amplified, not only for your air quality but for your personal health and general cleanliness of the place.
I've also tried several ionizer/filter combinations (room size) but generally they are useless for anything but the actual ionization, which helps to keep dust and crap down to a minimum. A little air circulator in the corner of the room isn't going to move much air and it sure isn't going to move all the air. The area around the ionizer will be okay I guess.
Hope this helps, I'm no HVAC guru, just someone who's done some thinking on it. :-)
Is to get both an ioniser and a deioniser and stick them in opposite ends of the room, turn them up to full whack and let them battle it out!
Then in another room, get a humidifier and a dehumidifier and do the same.
Makes for hours of entertainment, far better than Quake.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
I've read various accounts of just how helpful indoor plants might be, some claiming a few spider plants (supposedly among the best, I have ~20 in my 2br apartment and a few in my office) help, some claiming you'd need a rainforest in the building to make an appreciable difference. A quick web search turns up the Plants for Clean Air Council.
I originally began researching the subject because I live in a downtown appartment and the building is so badly built that we smell the cigarette smoke from adjacent rooms.
I realize this is a low-tech solution but have you thought about moving? Your health has got to be worth something, right?
If I were seated in a restaurant next to someone who was smoking, I'd ask to be moved. A long meal is just a couple hours. You're living with smoke. For several hours a day. (Health issues aside, I'm not an anti-smoking freak but I also don't want to have to smell the stuff.)
If you really value your health, move. That will do more good than any electronic gizmo.
If you want some really good tips on how to make your house healthy as well as a good discussion on why modern houses are worse for you than older houses, check out the book Home Comforts : The Art and Science of Keeping House. (Summary: today's houses are air tight and full of germs. Old houses had windows and people actually opened them.) I highly recommend it and it will help you pick up chicks if your into that sort of thing.
InitZero
Drinking H202 is a bad idea. It's a great disinfectant, but there are all sorts of bacteria in your digestive system that you need to process and digest your food. Drinking hydrogen peroxide will kill all of it if you drink enough.
I use a diluted H2O2 solution as mouthwash, it does a much better job than most things like Listerine without out the awful taste. But if you accidentally swallow some, watch out for diarrhea.
Don't do that to yourself. Pay no attention to that bunk theory.
I found that removing the dead birds helps a lot.
I keep canarys in every room of my house. If it dies, I know it's time to leave the room. Last year the bird in my bedroom died and I slept on the couch for a week. The autopsy report came back and explained little birdie died from cancer. I got another bird for the bedroom and am happily sleeping in my bed again. But, I'll tell you what...those cages sure can begin to stink. I wish I had something to make my house smell better. Any slashdot suggestions?
I've never worked in an office with windows that could be opened.
Actually, I've worked in a couple that didn't even have windows!
Browser? I barely know her!
One more thought: Change furnace filters regularly. A HVAC tech once told me he was amazed at the number of folks that never change their furnace filter.
I keep my furnace fan running 24/7 to keep air circulated, but if you're circulating crappy air, what good is that? The solution is to simply crack a window once in a while. You don't need a gale-force wind whipping through to clean all the air out, just enough so that your apartment can "breathe".
A word of warning, however; if you're right downtown, opening a window may simply allow exhaust fumes to come in instead. If there's a lot of air pollution outside, then no matter what you're pretty screwed, and need to go with an actual air filter.
If you like to vacuum, Filter Queen vacuums are actually rated as air purifiers, and the active carbon filter needs only be changed once a year. So each time you vacuum (or just leaving it running on low for a while) it purifies the air. You can get them used/refurbished rather reasonably, if you look in the right places.
Mr. Ska
NASA have done a lot of research on this at their John C. Stennis Skylab Space Center. Dr. Wolverton discusses the effect of 50 houseplants in "Eco-Friendly House Plants".
There are many horrors lurking in our homes and offices. Perusal of this article (text-only link here) could lead you to live out your life in a tent. However the "big, bad three" ( formaldehyde, benzene and trichloroethylene) are largely scrubbed from the air by plants. The book referred to above looks at the most effective. You are correct in thinking that Chlorophytum comosum (Thunb.) Jaccques (The spider plant) is particularly useful. An important point is that plants are an effective, low-tech solution, self-replicating and aesthetically-pleasing - this beats expensive, quick-fix high-tech solutions any time.
It should come as no surprise that vascular plants do this so well as they have been cleaning earth's atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years (and much longer in the case of their predecessors).
- Derwen
http://fsfeurope.org/