After three years covering covid, WaPo's Lena Sun built an air purifier.
January 15, 2023 7:41 PM   Subscribe

An air cleaner can help remove indoor pollutants and reduce the spread of pathogens such as the coronavirus. Washington Post’s Lena Sun demonstrates how to make one. Covid is not going away for the foreseeable future. Vaccination, rapid tests and appropriate masking are important ways to protect against getting sick and spreading the virus. So is better indoor air quality.

OP note: As a person who gets nailed about half the year by airborne allergens in Austin, this thing would be great in my home. Except my condo is about the size of one of my boots, and this thing is not small. I run a box fan 24/7 for white noise and air movement; I intend to purchase just one of these filters and secure it to the back of the fan; while not *as* good as one of these Corsi-Rosenthal purifiers, it will still capture a lot of allergens and/or pathogens in the air.
(note to self: clean your A/C filter)
posted by dancestoblue (6 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: looks like a double! -- taz



 


I've been doing the "bungee cord a furnace filter to a box fan" thing for years, and it works quite well. I'd go so far as to suggest that if you have a box fan and you haven't stuck a 24x24" filter to the intake side of it, you're really missing an opportunity to stop blowing dust and other nasty junk around your house. You don't even need to seal it up perfectly or anything.

Never bothered to go for the full cube arrangement of filters + fan, though. Seems a bit overkill to me, although it certainly does give you a huge amount of filter area. But those 2" deep filters aren't terribly cheap... if I was going to build something, I'd be tempted to just build a box with a fan at one end—or maybe a dumpster-salvage squirrel cage blower from an old furnace? those things really move air—and then a nice HEPA filter with some cheap blue-mesh prefilter on top. Running nice HEPA filter media without any sort of prefilter strikes me as a bit of a waste; unless your house is substantially cleaner than mine (entirely possible), even the cheapest of furnace filters capture a fair amount of crap (pet hair, lint, carpet fiber, more pet hair, sawdust, etc.), and everything you capture before the HEPA is going to lengthen its life.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:05 PM on January 15, 2023 [3 favorites]


Looks like we need to replace the MetaFilter.
posted by Reverend John at 8:18 PM on January 15, 2023 [13 favorites]


the posts clearly need to be tagged as HepaFilter
posted by DoctorFedora at 8:59 PM on January 15, 2023 [6 favorites]


Box needs a bit more tape, aye?
posted by JoeXIII007 at 9:15 PM on January 15, 2023


If you're willing to spend a little more money, and you need something more compact that also has prefilters, etc., the Coway Airmega AP-1512HH is an excellent air purifier with a filter that lasts for a really long time. It's been the winner in several independent tests, and it's not overly expensive. I have bought several for my apartment, my office, as gifts, etc., and they've always been excellent. I see they start at around 160 bucks in the US.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 10:04 PM on January 15, 2023 [1 favorite]


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