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Safe Indoor Air Quality

Safe Indoor Air Quality Is Filtering Out Bacteria, Viruses, and Allergens

Now more than ever it is important to have good indoor air quality and safe indoor air quality. Your furnace filtration system needs to be able to filter out bacteria, viruses, and allergens including mold spores. There are lots of filters on the market with these claims but do they really perform as advertised.

Most homes in the GTA have either very poor air filtration or no filtration at all due to cheap pleated media filters on the market. This leads to a whole host of indoor allergy symptoms and homeowners suffering needlessly when indoors. Let’s face it, the outdoor air isn’t as great as it used to be in Toronto coupled with people self-isolating at home due to the recent pandemic…now is the time to protect the indoor air of your home.

Let’s look at the standard pleated furnace filter. Its basically like a facemask for your furnace. All of the airborne allergens such as household dust, fibers, pollen, mold spores that are naturally in our environment flow through the filter to either heat or cool the home and get stuck or collect in the furnace filter. Other harmful allergens such as bacteria and viruses mostly flow either past or right through these filters because the micron size of bacteria and viruses are too small to be trapped by an ordinary furnace filter.  

The majority of the quality or higher-end pleated furnace filters are usually rated for 1.0 micron in size. This means that they are fairly efficient for small particles but not very effective for small particles such as 0.3 microns or smaller. Pleated filters can't filter out these smaller particles because it would clog the filter and reduce airflow through the furnace to such a degree that your furnace would stop working. Unfortunately, most bacteria and viruses are smaller than 1.0 micron in size.

What is a micron you ask? It is a unit of measurement used to measure anything with mass. 1 micron is 1 millionth of a meter. For reference, a human hair is approximately 70 microns.

So what is the solution? How do we protect the furnace and duct from household dust buildup but also provide a safe and healthy indoor environment by filtering out allergens that can have serious and sometimes long term health effects?

The answer is the 40-year-old technology of simple pleated media furnace filters needs to go! This technology and performance need to be put to the curb. There are way more advanced air filtration solutions on the market.

One of the best furnace filtration systems on the market, which has been in R&D for over 15 years with numerous independent trials, is a polarized agglomeration filter. This is a media furnace filter that still allows proper airflow through the filter but just like a magnet attracts large and small particulate to woven fiberglass strands. These filters actually save you money since the media replacement is less frequent and less expensive than high-quality standard pleated filters. The benefit though is that they reduce airborne allergen concentrations up to 94% compared to standard pleated furnace filters.

If you’re really serious about having good indoor air quality, a central HEPA filtration system is an ideal add on to the polarized agglomeration filter. This takes airborne allergen filtration to the next level by increasing the airborne allergen filtration of anything 0.3 microns to 99.97%. Here you have to be careful as well. There are lots of systems on the market with claims they can’t support.

At Verify Air Quality Test, we have narrowed what systems work and what systems don’t down to a couple of manufacturers. How did we do this? Simple…we tested the systems ourselves using the latest technology in laser particle counters as well as laboratory testing for mould and bacteria. If you’d like more information on what systems can protect your health and your family’s health. Give us a call.