Cleaner air for you
air cleaner is different. It uses very high voltage to charge plates to attract particles. That is very effective. It can be as effective as HEPA air purification.
“It’s not used commercially in any application that I’m aware of because they’re relatively expensive to operate, they use a tremendous amount of voltage, and they’re fairly dangerous. There have to be safeguards built in so that a homeowner doesn’t circumvent those safeguards. They also have to be cleaned very, very often. It’s often suggested that you clean the plates every 30 days. Testing has shown that that is probably not enough. Depending on the environment, it might be every day or every two days.
“With an electronic air purifier, the plates fill up with material, which, if they’re effective, can happen very rapidly and they lose their effectiveness. Every time a particle hits an area, that is one area that can no longer have a particle attracted to it. As you coat that, you lose effectiveness. They can be very effective if you want to maintain them. Most people don’t. Most people don’t want to maintain them, and most people won’t maintain them. When that happens, you end up with a machine that’s giving you very, very low levels of performance.”
After figuring out how each one works, which is the most affordable? The electronic air purifier has a starting price of $500. Brown notes that HEPA air purifiers [his company sells only HEPA], depending on which one you buy, can be some of the cheapest models sold on the market due to mass production. A good one will cost $250 to $400. He says because there is a large number of them on the market, you have to be careful when choosing one because a lot of them are not adequate due to variations in design. “In some of the machines that we sell, we use activated charcoal in granular form because it gives you tremendous [filtering] capacity,” he explains. “Some machines have a simple piece of filter material embedded with activated charcoal and wrapped around the filter. So there is a lot of difference in the way HEPA air purifiers are designed.” There’s also the motor-strength factor or the motor’s ability to pull in air so that it can be filtered.
It’s also important that the air purifier be properly sized to the room that it’s operating in. If you take a machine that’s designed for 400 square feet and put it in 4,000 square feet, you’re not going to get very much performance, according to Brown. On the other hand, he says if you take a machine that’s designed for 400 square feet and put it in 200 square feet, you’re going to get incredible performance.
The Sharper Image Ionic Breeze machines have been sold for about $600. The UV lights, if you buy a stand-alone UV light bulb, can cost anywhere from $30 to $100.
“We’ve done a lot of research on air purifiers and we stay very involved in the market,” says Brown. “We look at everything that we order and that comes out. Most manufacturers bringing a new machine out will send a machine to us to try out.”
Brown suggests that the best and most important thing for people with allergies to do is encase their beds with impermeable barriers which he says is more important than air purification. “That’s far more important for them as a first step than air purification,” he stresses.
“Dust mites put off allergens which most of us who have allergies are allergic to,” he adds. “Dust mites are the most common allergens because they’re the most prevalent allergens that we are exposed to day and night. They live in pillows, mattresses, box springs, carpeting, and upholstered furniture. If you don’t encase your bed or do something with that, when you lie on your bed and you’re breathing allergens out of your bed, that air purifier running in the room is not necessarily going to help you very much. But if you’ve encased your bed and you have an air purifier running in your room, it’s going to remove the level of other allergens that are stirred up in your room so it can further reduce the amount of allergens that you are inhaling.
“The products that we provide are designed to help you isolate yourself from allergens to the extent that you can in the environment that you can control. Of course, the environment that you can typically control the very best is in your home — more specifically, in your bedroom. Well, air purifiers fit into that picture. If you have an air purifier that’s exchanging the air often enough and properly capturing the allergens, then you can reduce the amount of allergens that you are breathing and that should help you reduce your symptoms.”
For information on Allergy Air and More, visit www.allergyclean.com or e-mail Stevan Brown at stevanbrown@allergyclean.com. You can also visit Allergy Air and More’s Austin shop located at 3500 Jefferson Street, 512/323-5522. For more general information on air purification devices and lung health, visit the American Lung Association at www.lungusa.org and the Environmental Protection Agency at www.epa. gov.