More Nerd Approval
Irradiated by Stingray
The pollen bloom continues, as evidenced by the fact that the decongestant section at the grocery store looks like it was hit by a mongol horde with runny noses. In a strange coincidence, we’re still not firing on all cylinders yet either. But there is one thing which has made the various pollen blooms this year at least slightly more livable.
That is a Trane CleanEffects air filter, and it is utterly frickin’ amazing. The basic jist of Trane’s claims is that with a combination of electrostatic charges, a thin regular pre-filter, and this nifty little honeycomb collection grid, it will remove just about anything from the air.
They are not exaggerating.
The unit as a whole sits inline with your furnace and/or AC system and replaces the standard fiberglass filter that everyone has used since the dark ages. It needs cleaning roughly once a year, depending on load, and it’ll go you one better and tell you when it needs cleaning rather than making you guess when it’s due (that’s the little LEDs on the front - they go from green to red, and you can probably work the rest out).
Before we got this thing, the procedure for a pollen bloom was basically to suffer. Dope up with as much and as many antihistamines and such as would clear an elephant’s sinuses, and still we would sit around with all the mental capacity of an eggplant, and go through a rain forest’s worth of tissue every ten minutes. We’d close the windows, heat be damned, wash our faces religiously, and not a damn thing would change. Now, we close the doors and windows, and use a very nifty feature of the thermostat that came with the system which will circulate the air without actually running any of the heat or AC functions. On bad days, we just kick the system to run those fans non-stop. Within about an hour, our noses are clearing and we feel at least vaguely human again. We may not be back up to 100%, but we can at least function beyond staring blankly at everything. Even better, it doesn’t produce that ozone smell that so many air cleaners leave. As yet another bonus, there’s no more periodic “Damn, what size was that filter again?” checks for replacements. It’s washable.
If you’re more than a little tired of being laid low by seasonal plant-bukakke, I cannot reccomend this gizmo enough. Even bringing in “dirty” air through the vents in the attic rather than just scrubbing the already-indoors air over and over, this device flat out ends the worst effects of hayfever and allergy seasons.
September 30th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Is there much ozone associated with those? Most of the air cleaners I’ve seen seem to put out a lot of ozone. My wife suffers greatly from pollen, but ozone makes her very nauseous and gives her splitting headaches.
September 30th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
None that we can detect. Per Trane’s site: “TRANE CleanEffects also generates a minimal amount of ozone, less than 5 PPB (parts per billion), well below the 10 PPB FDA voluntary emission limit for medical devices and significantly below some ionic-type room appliances that may reach hundreds of PPBs.”
Granted, neither of us are very sensitive to ozone to begin with, but even after leaving it running overnight, neither of us have noticed any ozone smell at all.