After three years of covering covid, I built my own air filter
Covid is not going away for the foreseeable future. Vaccination, rapid tests and appropriate masking are important ways to protect against getting sick and spreading the virus.Get more news about home air filter,you can vist our website!
So is better indoor air quality.
As we enter Year 4 of this pandemic, with new variants popping up, I want to be able to gather more often — and safely — with family and friends. I want to host regular dinners featuring sour cherry pie, like the one I made for fellow health reporters after we had been working remotely — pretty much around-the-clock — for more than a year.
And I want to feel safe at work, where, like most reporters, I don’t have my own office. I can’t just close the door to keep out colleagues’ germs. Or open windows for fresh air.
So, as someone who likes to seize control of seemingly uncontrollable situations, I resolved to build my own DIY portable air cleaner.Generating cleaner indoor air at home and at work reduces everybody’s risk of being sickened by airborne pathogens such those that cause covid-19 and the flu.
While I’m pretty good at following recipes, I don’t have a lot of confidence in my ability to build stuff from scratch. Not even with Legos when my son was little. Forget about Ikea furniture.
But I decided to give this Corsi-Rosenthal Box a try because we would be gathering with lots of loved ones heading into the new year.The Corsi-Rosenthal Box is named for its two inventors, who were looking for a cost-effective way to build something that performs the same functions as costlier air-purification devices. They came up with the idea in August 2020, five months into the coronavirus pandemic.
Richard Corsi, the dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California at Davis, and Jim Rosenthal, the chief executive of Tex-Air Filters, teamed up to create the easy-to-assemble, inexpensive air cleaner using materials found at hardware stores or online. The box uses four common household air filters for the sides — the kind you use for a home HVAC system — a 20-inch fan on top, cardboard, scissors, and duct tape to hold it all together.
When the fan is turned on, air is pulled through the four sides of the box. The filters trap contaminated particles, allowing clean air to flow into the middle of the box and be pushed back out into the environment through the fan. The fan just needs to be plugged into a normal electrical outlet. Not only can the boxes reduce the spread of pathogens such as the coronavirus, they also can reduce other particles, such as those generated by wildfires, as well as dust and pollen.
The box removes all kinds of other pollutants, like “allergens, tiny particles created by chemical reactions to ozone or cleaning chemicals,” said Don Milton, an environmental and occupational health professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health, who came up with the name for the box.