Do Air Purifiers Really Help You Breathe Cleaner Air?

As Delhi-NCR continues to be in the grip of severe air pollution, there has been a significant rise in the sales of air purifiers – portable machines that help clear the air out of your home, reducing or increasing humidity, limiting access to air pollution, and generally keeping your home air clean.

According to market trends, the surge was witnessed especially after Diwali, when the air quality index or AQI in and around the national capital worsened and reached dangerously high levels. Delhi's air quality remained in the "poor" category with an overall AQI of 273, according to the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB).

Home air purifiers often claim to be reliable solutions for indoor air quality health concerns, but do they really clean your household air?

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How do air purifiers work?

Air purifiers filter the air in a single room - not your entire house. Most of the current portable air purifiers have been designed to filter both particles and gases. But one filter cannot do the entire job. So many air cleaners contain multiple filters, one for particles, another for gases, and still more for gases, chemicals, or odours.

Portable air purifiers use fans to draw air in through one or more filters, trap various contaminants, and then recirculate the cleaner air back into the room. They vary in weight, but they can usually be moved from room to room. Some can be mounted on the wall. And there are even wearable and desktop versions too.

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According to experts, the most important variable in an air purifier is the filter, and the best choice to filter particles is a device that has a HEPA filter - designed to collect at least 99.5 per cent of particles in the air that are three microns or less in size. Generally speaking, this type of particle includes pollen, dust, moisture, bacteria, viruses, and dirt. The effectiveness of a HEPA filter depends on how tightly bound the fibers are.

Are air purifiers good for your health?

According to doctors, air purifiers can benefit your respiratory and circulatory system, but only to a degree. A lot of other things are dependent on:

• The types of contaminants in your home
• The ventilation in your home
• The size of the space you are trying to clean
• The type and number of filters the air purifier uses
• The CADR rate of the air purifier
• How much can you control the sources of contamination
• How consistently you use the air purifier

Apart from being airborne, dust and toxic air particles also embed themselves in furniture, bedding, and carpeting, as well as collect on hard surfaces like walls and ceilings. So, your housecleaning habits also affect, to a great extent, how much work your air purifier has to do.

According to studies, you may find a significant improvement in respiratory health and allergy or asthma symptoms after using an air purifier. Also, it can lead to significant improvement in cardiovascular health.

A few kinds of purifiers can also reduce airborne particles that contain viruses. To do so, it must be able to remove very small particles ranging from 0.1 to 1 microns, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

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