Air Purification Systems: How They Work to Improve Indoor Air Quality

Today’s energy-efficient houses are prime candidates for air purification systems that safeguard indoor air quality. The more efficiently your house conserves energy, the tighter it’s generally sealed. As air-tight construction eliminates infiltrating outside air, it also reduces natural ventilation. With limited outdoor air exchange, indoor air contaminants can concentrate in living spaces, accumulating to levels high enough to cause allergic symptoms and other discomforts in susceptible individuals. Inside the shelter of your home, you may actually be inhaling undiluted quantities of air pollution significantly higher than what you’d be exposed to outdoors. Air purification systems continuously remove airborne particulates—both the ones you can see and the microscopic variety—from your interior air.

Air purification systems are available in two general varieties:

Room air purifiers are stand-alone units that cleanse the air in enclosed rooms only. Most units incorporate a blower fan to draw room air through a high-efficiency filter. Some electronic room air purifiers use the principle of electrostatic attraction to charge airborne particulates and capture them on electronic collector plates. While room air purifiers are useful in confined spaces, they are not designed to address interior air quality issues in the entire house.

Whole house air purification systems mount inside the ducts of your heating and cooling system. Because the total air volume of your home passes through the ductwork an average of seven times per day, a whole house system is positioned to cleanse all the air on a continuous basis. Whole house units typically utilize high-efficiency pleated fabric filters with a MERV (Minimum Efficiency Reporting Value) rating above 8. These filters can capture inorganic and organic particulate sizes of 1.0 microns and smaller. Whole house purification systems may include additional air quality technology such as disinfecting ultraviolet lamps to destroy microorganisms like mold spores, pollen and bacteria in the air.

Sobieski Services supplies air purification systems to protect every breath you take at home. Our goal is to help educate our customers in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC and plumbing systems).

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