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Comment by dinvlad | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how that compares just to some baggies with activated carbon.

Get a fan and a furnace filter and you have a top-of-the-line air purifier.

They are generally cheap enough now that it's probably not worth the effort. I think my last 2 cost 35 a piece, and came with extra filters and such.

I used to think they were kinda useless until I had tile ripped up. The neverending dust was driving my wife insane. On a whim, bought a couple purifiers and it's cut the dust down by at least 90%.

Any chance you could provide a link to an example product? Air purifiers seem pretty expensive, but I expect that might be due to my location

I bought these for 34.99 last month, but it appears to be gone now.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01N4IRIWK

If you're looking for more features and a more known brand, Costco has these for 99, which is a pretty good deal considering their size and that they come with all extra filters.

https://www.costco.com/winix-true-hepa-4-stage-air-purifier-...

Perfect, thank you very much.

Rule of thumb: cut the quoted theoretical capacity in half. This one's theoretical capacity is 360 square feet, so you'd need eight of them in a 1500 square foot apartment.

Never heard of it. Perhaps for its Hepa, 99.9% jargon sure.

But we ran a single Bissel Air400 in a 2k sq ft area and it visibly reduced the dust you see on glass cabinets and such. We used to have to clean them about every 3 days. With that running, it was about every 2 to 3 weeks!

https://cleanaircrew.org/box-fan-filters/

Not exactly. As I understand it furnace filters will just filter out particulate matter which is measured on the order of micron. It doesn't really do much for VOCs, which are measured on the order of picometers(0.2 microns = 200,000 picometers).

You need another filter like activated charcoal which works differently than particulate filters (adsorption vs merely trapping particles in a winding path)

The comment I'm replying to says "I wonder how a bag of charcoal would do". I assume you'd add that to my list of components.

VOCs are nanometer scale. A rough estimate for atomic bond length in organic compounds is .15 nanometers. CO2, which should be smaller than basically any VOC, is half a nanometer across.

I used MERV 11 and still got tons of dust everywhere, and the ductwork is also musty smelling in the spring and fall.. prefer summer and winter because it's not as noticeable then.

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