Clean at last

Well, for years now, Lauren has been coming home and saying that, “Our house smells like an old house.” Personally, I don’t smell it, but I have a pretty poor sense of smell. A poor sense of smell comes in handy when you teach middle school, but isn’t much use in diagnosing OHS.

Now, there are only so many years of hearing Lauren express a desire for something that I can take before I feel that it is my duty to do something about it. And so, about 2 months ago, I began to research air purifiers intensely.

The research took about a month, and the conclusion I came to was that the amount of money that it would cost to buy an air purifier that would have even a remote chance of doing anywhere near the job that Lauren wanted was way out of her price range. Not so much out of her price range in the, “I can’t afford that” sense. More out of her price range in the, “No way I’m going to pay that much” sense.

But I also learned that basically all we needed was a ordinary pre-filter to catch the dust and cat hair, a HEPA filter to catch basically anything down to your medium size bacteria and an activated charcoal filter to catch any remaining smelly molecules. Okay, the real reason for the activated charcoal filter is to make people say, “Dang, Lloyd, that thing has three filters.” I decided that we could do without any negatively charged ions fields or ultraviolet light nonsense.

The basic design was going to be 2 inch prefilter -> boxfan -> 6 inch HEPA filter -> box fan -> 4 inch charcoal filter. Naturally, the filters and the box fans are 20 inches by 20 inches, which would give me a 20x20x20 cube of air purifying goodness.

So I ordered my charcoal filter and my custom made HEPA filter online and figured we could pick up the pre-filter anywhere. In fact, we picked it up a week or so ago at a thrift store. My charcoal filter had arrived after about 2 weeks, but I hadn’t seen the HEPA filter yet and we were going on a month of waiting.

Now, as cruel fate would have it, there were a couple of air purifiers at an auction I went to last weekend. They were nice, but they were going to be the last thing to sell and I couldn’t stay until the end. So I asked my auction buddy Matthew if he would bid on them for me. I told Matthew to bid up to $250 and I would like to get at least one air purifier and one of the replacement filters. Matthew called me three hours later and said I got 2 of them for $50.

With a little help from Sam, I got them home and in place without Lauren seeing them. I present you, as I presented Lauren, with the RxAir 3000 Air Purifier:

“Rx3000 is used in over 400 hospitals and is FDA-cleared as a Class II Medical Device. Priced at less than $5,000 per unit to service a 1,500 – 3,000 sq. ft. area, Rx3000 is very cost effective… The Rx3000 combines powerful germicidal ultraviolet (UV) light with a patented 5-stage HEPA filtration proven in independent EPA- and FDA-certified laboratory testing to destroy on first pass over 99.97% of airborne viruses, bacteria and other contaminants.  

Needless to say, Lauren was absolutely thrilled –once she learned that they were only $25 each. I believe that in less than a month, our house will go from smelling like an old house to smelling like a hospital.

Oh, and my 6 inch HEPA filter arrived today. Does anyone need a HEPA filter?