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)?

Comments

The thing to do...

[Matts]

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.

Who needs all this fancy tech stuff?

[Crewd]

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?

Indoor plants will help

[Derwen]

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