HEPA Me Out, Please! I'm Allergic!

At left is a Hepa furnace filter, plugged with... stuff. First, we thank God it's in the filter and not in our lungs and noses. Second, we can't help being curious about where this.... stuff came from. It came from our home. We made that stuff.

It's dust, laundry lint, pet dander and hair (see previous post), people hair and dander ( I myself rival a pack of Labradors as a dander producer), food particles, tracked-in shoe dirt, pollen from outside, pollen from house plants, stuffing from the old couch, peeled paint, mildew and mold, soot from the furnace and stove, smoke particles from Himself's beloved cigars, bacteria (viruses are often small enough to pass through filters), and the aroma of that Hawaiian pizza your son saved to finish off later. The stuff in the filter is, in a word, your lifestyle--- come back to haunt you.

I do not favor the sterile, antiseptic life valued by some. But I see everyone's filters, and I see what gets by the filter and plugs up the AC coil or the outlet grilles, and I know we're relying on filtration to do what my mother's generation accomplished by cleaning. Oh, dear, I hear the angry mob. Must go hide in the root cellar.

The presence of medium to high efficiency filtration in our air systems and vacuum cleaners is a big improvement over earlier standards that returned most airborne particles to the living space because the coarser filters didn't catch them. It's wonderful that we have Miele and Dyson
supervacs that filter down to viral-size particles and let nothing by. But those impressive filters do not make our homes clean by themselves. They don't eliminate sources of allergic irritation and infection that overpower furnace filters, room air purifiers and occasionally-used vacuum cleaners. The causes of poor indoor air quality, apart from poor outdoor air quality, are mostly the things we bring home ourselves.

You can't have pets without having a certain level of dander and dirt. You can't have garbage in the house for long without having odors, mold and bacteria. You can't use the clothes dryer indoors without having some escaped lint flying around. And you can't trust filtration devices to remove all of the pollutants in your home without carrying the battle to every corner of every teenager's bedroom with the traditional weapons of cleanliness (broom, dustpan, vacuum, etc.). As our homes get tighter, exchanging less air with the outdoors, we trap our allergens and pollutants indoors with us, along with the normal dirt of American living. Removing those negative air factors is mostly down to the tough chore of cleaning, aided by good filters.