HEPA Air Purifiers Info

In my researching of various HEPA air purifiers, it has come time to take a look at Honeywell HEPA Air Purifiers. At first glance, they’re not particularly remarkable. They generally occupy the low end of the price spectrum, and have the features that you would expect, nothing more, nothing less.

That’s when it struck me just how exceedingly normal Honeywell HEPA Air Purifiers are. Look closer and you’ll notice…nothing. There’s no patented Honeywell this, nor do they even try to compare to any other brand directly. In fact, Honeywell HEPA Air Purifiers, even when just looking at that product, feels like a sort of afterthought of the rest of the company.

Then I looked further into the company, and it was suddenly very easy to see why. To say that Honeywell makes more than HEPA filter air purifiers would be akin to saying “The Earth is slightly useful to use humans”. The company has produced thermostats, heaters, electric motors, computers, cluster bombs, land mines, missile guidance systems, and napalm, among many other things.  Within the realm of HEPA, you can get both a True HEPA Air Purifier, and a HEPA-Type device, depending on your needs.

However, there is one enormous blemish on the company record, and it becomes particularly ironic if you are considering a Honeywell HEPA air purifier. To quote Wikipedia: “The United States Environmental Protection Agency states that no corporation has been linked to a greater number of Superfund toxic waste sites than has Honeywell. Honeywell ranks 44th in a list of U.S. corporations most responsible for air pollution, releasing more than 4.25 million kg (9.4 million pounds) of toxins per year into the air.”

Er.  Wow.  So it seems that Honeywell is creating some of the air pollution that its HEPA air purifiers then clean.  There’s another way to look at that, though.  Honeywell doesn’t have a particularly high employee death rate (that I could find), so that means they must be REALLY GOOD at air purification, right?  Not exactly something you’d want to include if you wrote any HEPA air purifier reviews, but, hey, it’s information nonetheless.

Commercialism rules all, though, and all of this matters very little when a family needs something.  If you’re looking to pick up a HEPA air purifier that you can be reasonably sure will be relatively dependable, and will have filters and other parts available for it for the foreseeable future, then Honeywell probably makes the best HEPA air purifier for you.

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What are Hepa Air Purifiers?  Obviously it’s a device that filters air, but what exactly does HEPA mean? HEPA stands for High Efficiency Particulate Arresting. These filters have been around for quite a while, though they’re only more recently seeing public use. Way back in the ’50’s, the United States government, or more specifically the Atomic Energy Commission had a need for something to remove the tiny radioactive particulates that are created in the process of creating atomic energy. Since that time, HEPA filter air purifiers have been using HEPA technology to clean the indoors in various situations, from beauty parlors to clean rooms. Allery and asthma doctors use HEPA air filters to help alleviate sufferers of allergies and asthma. But how does HEPA work, exactly?

To understand how HEPA air purifiers work, you have to have a good imagination, and at least a passable grip on physics.

Imagine particles floating through the air, all of different sizes. Sort of like how you can actually see dust particles when the sun bounces off them at the right angle. Now imagine a filter that doesn’t allow the larger particles through; only the tiniest. We’re talking particles so small that the human eye couldn’t hope to catch a glimpse of them. If a single sheet of this HEPA paper were placed in front of a fan that was constrained, such as in HEPA air purifiers, very little air would be able to pass through because of the tiny size of the holes. HEPA filter air purifiers made in such a way would need constant filter changes since the holes would be plugged quite rapidly. So, double the size of the sheed, and we’ll get twice the filter life and air flow. This only works to a degree, though, because you can only grow the sheet so large before it becomes completely impractical. Instead, HEPA air purifiers are built with these sheets folded back and forth on top of itself so that a very large surface area is presented to the airflow, and the HEPA air filteres are made far more efficient. This is very similar to how real-world HEPA filters are made in actual HEPA air purifiers. In some cases, there is as much as 40 square feet of filter material folded up in the HEPA section of a single filter. These sheets are constructed of either fiber, paper-like, or a polymer material, depending on the actual filter.

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When picturing HEPA materials, you’re probably picturing something similar to an imaginary colander or screen. The materials in HEPA air purifiers actually do not look anything like that. Instead, they look like a very thin bail of fiberes, creating a veritible maze that the air has to find a route through, particle by particle. There are three different ways that HEPA filter air purifiers stop particulates. The easiest to understand is that a particle basically runs into a fiber and sticks. the second way is the particle getting within one diameter of a fiber in HEPA Air Purifiers and getting stuck on the fiber as it tries to skid by. Lastly, and the most complicated, is when very, very small particles (we’re talking 0.1 micron) travel in the gas flow, they sort of jump and juke due to the collisions with other molecules. This is called Brownian motion, and in itself can cause the molecules to be even more susceptible to the first two methods. To understand Brownian motion, picture bumper cars ramming into each other completely at random. Now picture the edges of the bumper car ring are actually sticky, or magnetic, holding the bumper cars to them. Now, to make things far more complicated, we’ll basically put edges all over the place so that the bumper cars have to navigate a treacherous maze. Only the other idiot bumper car drivers are still ramming each other, causing each other to get stuck, even if they would’ve skid through scot-free.

So you can see how HEPA air purifiers are capable of stopping bacteria, viruses, and mold spores, in addition to larger, more obvious items such as dust. For the most part, HEPA air filter purifiers can claim to be 99.97% efficient at removing the particles that are 0.3 microns from the air that passes through the HEPA air purifiers. The key word, though, is pass through. If the airflow doesn’t pass through the HEPA air purifieres, than it cannot be claimed. So, in essence, the claim of 99.97% is actually pretty inaccurate in those HEPA air purifiers that aren’t well designed, in which much of the airflow goes right around the HEPA air filters, and back into the room uncleaned. One series of HEPA air filters, the IQAir HealthPro series, is the only line that actually specifies that over 95% of air that enters their HEPA air purifiers goes through the actual HEPA filter.

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