LOS ANGELES — As buildings and brush continue to smolder in Los Angeles, a toxic soup of smoke, chemicals and particulate matter is being spread across the region by gusty winds, prompting a surge in interest in air purifying devices.
Web searches for “air purifier for wildfire smoke” in Los Angeles have increased by more than 5,000 percent since the fires broke out, according to Google Trends.
But what kind of air purifier should residents get? Here’s what the air quality experts had to say.
The good news is Angelenos need not break the bank on these purifying devices — the cost of which can range anywhere from $50 to $1,200.
“There’s a lot of gimmicky air purification systems out there, but for the purposes of particulate matter coming from smoke, any fan and filter will work,” said Luke Montrose, assistant professor of Environmental and Radiological Health Sciences at Colorado State University.
This includes homemade air purifying devices made from a box fan and an HVAC particulate air filter, he said.
Montrose said these homemade purifying boxes are highly effective and cost-effective, but he cautioned that they can be easily damaged by pets or small children. If possible, he recommends investing in an air purifying machine.
- HEPA for filtering, carbon for cleaning
Dr. Afif El-Hasan, an asthma and air quality expert with Kaiser Permanente Orange County, recommends people impacted by wildfires purchase an air purifier that is both HEPA certified and has a carbon filter.
A HEPA device can filter 99.97 percent of any airborne particles that are 0.3 microns or larger, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. This will do a great job of filtering ash particles produced by the recent wildfire but will not clean chemicals from the air, said El-Hasan.
“My preference is not just that the air purifier is filtering the air but that it’s also cleaning the air, and the way that it does that is if there’s also a carbon filter included,” he said. “There’s a lot of harmful chemicals that were formed by the fires, because those fires were burning houses where there’s plastics, metal, paint and drywall.”
