Of all the things that catch your eye when shopping for the holiday season in India, if you live in the National Capital Region of India for the past few years, an air purifier must have crossed your mind. With the Air Quality Index (AQI) topping 400 in Noida according to numerous sources, now could be the perfect time for you to get an air purifier for your home. However, do air purifiers really work? Being devices whose operation you cannot actually see, many questions remain as to whether an air purifier really makes a big difference in the home and if the difference is big enough to have an impact on your health.
Explaining the invisible
Speaking to News18, Michael Leat, a design engineer at Dyson, says that while outdoor air quality is much better studied and understood, the level of information and understanding about indoor air quality and its long-term impact on the human health is still developing. “Outdoor air quality is better understood, and studies indicate that there is a potentially significant long-term health impact. The main effects observed are respiratory problems in adults and lung development in children. However, for indoor air, our homes are increasingly sealed off for air conditioning and stuff, causing stagnant air to recirculate inside. Given the poor quality of the air outside, the air inside the houses can have a greater impact on health than the one breathed outside, ”he says.
While this is a real problem, the trick is often to explain to a person how indoor air quality is affected. Virtually all household elements and actions, common such as cooking, cleaning, furniture polishing and the like, have an impact on the air quality inside our homes. As a result, Leat says the key is to visualize the invisible to users in the form of data, which then helps them count a spike in PM2.5 (particles smaller than 2.5 microns) or VOCs (volatile organic compounds) with a specific action that takes place inside a house.
“Our early purifiers had the ability to detect contaminants and respond accordingly. But people didn’t know why they were responding and what the problem was, so there was a huge disconnect in their understanding of how and why the purifier worked. On Dyson’s next-generation purifiers, we have added displays that show what types of contaminants the purifier is responding to, showing how it works. This can improve individual understanding of home air quality events, ”says Leat. Dyson also has a smartphone app, which displays daily and weekly tabulated data in terms of PM2.5, PM10, VOC, NO2, temperature, and humidity levels in your home.
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The impact of bad air at home
Arun Verma, head of the research and development department at American Air Filter International, says that the WHO indicative guidelines for outdoor air quality in Europe should serve as a standard to follow for indoor air in India, given the disparity in pollution between the two regions. In this note, Verma highlights that while Europe until now followed the EN779 standard for air quality and the US adopted ASHRAE 52.2, India did not have a real established standard, which does not generate real control over air quality within homes.
Today, ISO 16890 apparently ties these knots together. As Verma puts it, “In accordance with their particulate matter guidelines, which Europe has already adopted, they specify a minimum performance of 50 percent efficiency for PM2.5 and PM1 filters to meet health standards. The World Health Organization (WHO) guideline has required ISO 16890 to set maximum permissible levels of airborne particles, such as PM2.5, which stands at 25ug / m3 for air to be rated “good”. Setting these standards is really important to understanding how bad the air is around us and taking seriously its impact on long-term health and disease. “
A research study in the Indian Chest Society’s Lung India journal, published in October 2015, further underscores the massive impact that filtering the air at home cannot have on you. “The WHO fact sheet on Household Air Pollution (PAH) from Indoor Pollutants states that 3.8 million premature deaths occur annually, including stroke, ischemic heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and lung cancer, all of which are attributed to exposure to household air pollution, ”says study titled ‘Improving Indoor Air Quality: The Air Filter Advantage’ by Vannan Kandi Vijayan, Haralappa Paramesh , Sundeep Santosh Salvi and Alpa Anil Kumar Dalal.
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Lack of awareness
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also observes a variety of both immediate and long-term effects of indoor air pollution, which have corresponding effects on personal health. Despite this, AAF’s Verma says indoor air filtration is only treated as a regulation, and lack of awareness is one of the key factors. “Any building that is certified for lead to be qualified as a green building must have a two-step air filtration method at all times. So some of these industrial setups have air filtration, but I don’t think it’s by choice, ”says Gupta.
Gupta also states that most industrial air purification setups do not require additional infrastructure. However, the goal of looking for the cheapest way to check the air filtration checkbox often leads to unwanted results. On the personal implementation front, Dyson Leat claims that this is what the company started to do differently from the others. “When we started testing, the only standard methodology available was CADR, which has been around for more than 30 years. It is done in a small room, with a purifier that is placed in the middle of the room. It uses a fan to keep contaminants mixed in the room and has a ceiling fan to start the test. There are elements in this that are not realistic for our real world homes; for example, nobody puts a purifier in the middle of a room, ”he adds.
It is this that, according to Leat, helped Dyson devise its Polar test mechanism and “detect, capture and project” air purification strategy. The core of this is setting up product testing and data collection in line with the real world, all of which combine to reduce misinformation and lack of awareness about indoor air pollution, and the role of an air purifier in today’s world.
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