Indoor air filtration could lead to increased airborne endotoxin levels (2020)
sciencedirect.com
sciencedirect.com
1) If you are lucky enough to live in an area with clean air, opening a window is orders of magnitude quicker and more effective way to clean air.
2) Gas stoves are the worst thing you can do to your house air (a fume Hood can partially mitigate this)
3) You should be weary of using any cleaning product without ventilation (open windows for a whole day)
4) HEPA filters work, but slowly. Realize you can sneeze into these things and some % of your sneeze goes right through/around the filter. They need multiple passes to fully clean the air. Big quiet HEPA filters are the way to go.
5) Activated Carbon filters grab the stuff HEPA can't but they are very slow at it, and I haven't found anything commercial that works. The thin black layer on filters doesn't work, you need something more commercial like the ones people use when they are home growing weed. IMO, the effect of these is really hard to measure and I wouldn't personally suggest this right now.
6) Humidity control is important for health and has a relationship to air particulates
All of this work and basically I open windows any nice days, when I'm cleaning, and when I cook. Many HEPA filters and a beefy carbon filter cant compete with this. Even if it means running up the heat/AC bill a bit. I'm considering some sort of heat exchanger with filters in the future, but that is overkill. I am privileged to have nice air outside though and I realize this isn't THE solution for everyone.
As far as this article goes. HEPA filters are supposed to be replaced every 6 months, but even older filters get rid of so many particulates that we KNOW are bad for you it seems worth this tradeoff. Maybe a HEPA filter with a UV light could help (not by much probably), but be weary of "24 stage filters" and all that nonsense. HEPA is all most houses really need.
Did you mean induction? Convection just means "An oven with an internal fan to circulate hot air" (so actually not convection in the sense of a temperature difference driven air current).
Induction is using oscillating magnetic fields to heat a ferromagnetic cooking vessel.
> It is Co2 and No2 and vocs that surprise me about the gas stove.
Those are always the byproduct of low temperature open combustion of hydrocarbons, which is what a gas stove is doing.
> I'm no expert, just a lay person trying to make sense of it all but maybe the PM is from the food and therefore pretty consistent for all types of cooking?
I have an induction stove in a house whose baseline PM2.5, CO2, VOCs are very low (by design). I monitor PM2.5, C02 and VOCs during cooking, and the food itself definitely produces PM2.5, since that's the only measure that increases very much when I'm cooking (and only if I forget to turn on the stove extractor fan).
However, studies have shown that cooking on gas emits many times the amount of PM2.5 as electric. The difference is mostly in the energy delivery method, not the food cooked.
I did! Thank you, don't know how convection ovens got in my head.
> gas emits many times the amount of PM2.5 as electric
You are right. Gas stoves are worse on all air quality metrics, and the actual food cooking is only a tiny source of PM.
In your experience is cooking on induction still the #1 poor air quality cause in your house?
Yes, but there isn't much competition anymore now that I've removed all combustion appliances, so only in the comparative sense. Nowadays the biggest air quality issues come from outdoors (pollen, smoke, NOx from nearby freeway).
Studies have pointed to increased asthma and other respiratory ailments from gas stoves. There's no possible way electric stoves can be anywhere near as bad as literally burning fossil fuels inside your house.
Exchanging the air before the dust settles out is a lot better than having to dust a second time.
We've forgotten the unreasonable power of soap in our rush to Better Living Through Chemistry. Someone did tests and showed that a lot of 'cleaned' countertops are gross because the bacteria just get smeared around and homogenized, and counterintuitively the kitchen of a college student may be safer than the kitchen of a 40-something.
When I really clean my counters (parental visits, or realizing entropy is winning), I avoid a lot of cleaning products by first using one of those pot scrapers, then a little liquid soap, a scrub brush, and water. Once I've mopped that up the counter is probably clean, but if I use a cleaning product, this is when I do it. Just enough to swipe over everything, not to lift food particles or dried drops of tomato sauce from last night's spaghetti.
The other forgotten hero is white vinegar. They've tested removing pathogens, heavy metals and car exhaust from garden vegetables (turns out soil contamination is a surface exposure issue more than an absorption issue, even for lead) and white vinegar tested equal to or better than the best vegetable washes - which is to say that none are perfect but some are downright lousy.
Also make sure your sponges aren't gross. Using a gross sponge to clean things makes everything gross. Dipping them in white vinegar and some kettle water is a good way to clean a slightly funky sponge (and burn your fingers - patience is a virtue). Store your sponges elevated, or as I do in one case, prop it up against the wall so one edge (edge not side) is touching the wall and one touching the ground. And don't get sunk cost fallacy with your sponges. Buy in bulk, and when in doubt, throw it out. There's a kind of sponge that comes compressed, a dozen to a pack, and it expands the first time you get it wet. You can throw the spares in your junk drawer and they will get lost.
With plentiful, clean sponges, I tend to use a damp sponge when entropy is winning on the dust front (when it's so dusty you can see the dust from halfway across the room) because otherwise most of that is just going into the air and landing again. A wrung out sponge works wonders, and with a light enough touch I can even use it on books and banker's boxes without leaving any water damage. I recommend practicing on boxes, because if you squeeze the sponge, you might get a water spot. Cleaning dusty bookshelves has gone from an ordeal to just another chore because of this.
Not having a particularly dirty carpet to vacuum handy, what happens? You feel the dirt pelting your feet?
A relative of mine is a 70 year old widower. He's a huge slob and after his wife died 10 years ago, he really doesn't bother to ever clean his house or his kitchen. It's not depression, he's just never been a particularly neat or clean person and simply doesn't care beyond an extremely minimal level. He is in great health and never gets sick, whether from food poisoning or anything else.
> counterintuitively the kitchen of a college student may be safer than the kitchen of a 40-something
vinegar and a squeegee > water and sponge > spray cleaner
If you need an acidic product because you want to get ride of water stains, I have personally switched from white vinegar to citric acid. It’s cheap when bought in bulk as a powder. You can dilute it to the strength you want to. It takes less space to store and it doesn’t smell.
I've been wanting to monitor our house's air quality for a while, but usually get put off looking at how poorly most affordable air quality monitors are reviewed.
Also, what metrics are most important? There's monitoring out there for pm2.5, pm10, HCHO, CO2, AQI, TVOC, etc, it's a bit of an alphabet soup.
Considering that running a purifier lowers my yearly average PM2.5 exposure by approximately 60-80×, I think I'll continue running the purifier. Interesting data nonetheless.
EDIT: and apparently I was wrong.
"Overall, endotoxins deposition in the alveolar region increased regardless of whether the air purifier was loaded with used or new HEPA filters."
Regardless, I agree with you. If the filter prevents you from breathing X% bacteria and y% of bacteria produce endotoxins then your choices are
-Breathe in that extra x% bacteria and have them produce xy endotoxins directly in your lungs
-Kill the bacteria but breather in their xy endotoxins that are dispersed in the air.
Seems like a zero sum game when
This paper presents a different mechanism by which IAQ can be negatively impacted by a dirty media filter. It's possible that this affects change intervals or other measures, and it's possible that this is a matter of theoretical concern but in practice doesn't matter much. It's cliche to say that a study's conclusion is that there should be more studies, but that's really the case here.
I might have to check the air filter. I’ve been having the worst sinus issues I’ve ever had outside a sinus infection. My eyes constantly tear up, my nose will on occasionally completely shuts, and I’ve been having back to back sneezing attacks.
I originally chalked it up to seasonal allergies, as pollen count is quite high, but I’ve been suspicious of indoor air quality as well. To add to the confusion I got COVID around the same time it started.
FWIW, eventually had sinus surgery, now do saline rinse every day, astelin antihistame spray changed my life. YMMV. Good luck.
Car cabin filters should be replaced too.
None of us in my household has contracted Covid but that may just be luck.
That's a pretty clickbaity paper title. The lede was buried. A better title would have been: Regularly replacing HEPA filters may reduce endotoxins in filtered air
I'm a high school drop out so what do I know.
e.g. A car with a catalytic converter avoids increases of certain gases in the air, but it doesn't reduce what is already present.
In that light both the title and the suggested mitigation seem pretty straightforward.
What it's not clear to me is the definition of "purifier" and they operating principle: VMCs are normally harmless because they do not blow humid air and they keep air flowing so it's hard to offer room for "colonization" in most cases. That's the same principle we have for modern water heaters, classic ones, large pressurized balloons filled of hot sanitary water do require a regular daily extra-heat-up against legionella, modern ones with a not pressurized hot-water balloons and just a spiral pipe inside to "instantaneously" heat the sanitary water flowing in the pipe in most country do not demand anti-legionella heating cycle because they do not offer room for it's development. So much of the point of this study should be define the kind/family of devices they have testes.
Bit strange given that you've removed the alleged source of the problem (stuff caught in old filter).
“ Inflammation induced by LPS can induce cellular senescence, as has been shown for the lung epithelial cells and microglial cells (the latter leading to neurodegeneration).[55]”