Cleaning Air

When the air quality was particularly bad from the smoke from so many fires, my son decided it would be a great time to fry up some burgers on the stove top. I don't have a BBQ because I mainly don't eat meat, so we fry burgers. But he heated the oil too hot and the kitchen filled with smoke, so we opened the windows even though we were in the red for particulate levels!! Opened windows made it all worse.

So we all threw on N95s, and I remembered our Corsi-Rosenthal box can do double duty of cleaning the air of particulate matter, not just viruses. My CO2 monitor tracks particulates in the air as well as CO2, so we could watch, in real time, as the levels decreased enough to close the windows, and then get right down to single digits so we could take off our masks. 

It's really too bad the monitors don't track the level of viruses in the air (although something like that might become a reality). That would be a game changer!! Watching the levels reduce as the smoke cleared in my kitchen made it crystal clear that CR boxes work. We often need to see it to believe it. It's hard to do that with microscopic viruses. 

CO2 levels in a room are just an indication of how much we're breathing one another's exhalations, not how much Covid is present.

Some school boards are talking about removing HEPA units as they improve mechanical ventilation in each classroom, but that misses the different tasks of ventilation and filtration. Although excellent ventilation can help us breath less lung backwash from one another, when there are many Covid cases (or RSV or flippin' leprosy!) in the room, or too many particulates from wildfire smoke blowing our way, then we need some air filtration units in the room to clean it. 

They really work.