What is an air scrubber and why do I need one?
When you clean your home to remove dust and germs, how often do you think about cleaning the air? Air scrubbers are a new development, but they have quickly built a reputation as the workhorses of air purification for your home.
Considering the air inside your home could be two to five times more contaminated than outdoor air, improving your indoor air quality should be a priority. Poor air quality can lead to sick building syndrome (SBS), a condition where you have cold or fever symptoms in a particular building, only for the symptoms to pass as you leave that space. Air scrubbers can help you avoid SBS and other dangerous, unnecessary illnesses.
How does a home air scrubber work?
An air scrubber is an HVAC appliance that purifies the air of contaminants. The breadth of the air scrubber’s germ-killing ability is impressive. This device can kill particulates like dander and pollen, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that create odors like smoke and organisms like mold and viruses.
Air purifier vs. air scrubber
The cleaning scope of an air scrubber also goes beyond the capabilities of competing devices. While an air purifier is limited to airborne particles, some whole-home air scrubbers can kill germs on surfaces like doorknobs or countertops. These air scrubbers release particles that travel through your home, attract the germs off of surfaces and pull them back through the HVAC system to be filtered out of your indoor air.
Types of Air Scrubbers
Air scrubbers come in both whole-house and portable varieties. All air scrubbers work by passing contaminated air through filters, but the specific filters they use can vary slightly by model and brand.
With a whole-house air scrubber, the process starts when air gets pulled through the HVAC system. The air scrubber’s inner chamber has a mosaic of rods that are coated in titanium oxide. Centered within those rods is a germicidal UV light. When the air passes through the air scrubber, titanium rods and UV light alter the air’s DNA and kill the contaminants.
Finally, clean air is transferred out of the HVAC ductwork and back through your home. Some whole-house air scrubbers create negatively charged ions that attract the positively charged contaminants off of surfaces. In simpler terms, the air scrubber creates healthy particles that are sent into your home to grab unhealthy or harmful particles and pull them back into the filtering process.
In a portable model, dirty air gets sucked into the air scrubber and passes through a series of filters. The first filter, or pre-filter, captures large particles like animal fur or lint. Next, the HEPA filter removes smaller airborne pathogens like mold spores and asbestos. Finally, most models have a carbon filter that tackles odors like smoke and mildew. Between the array of filters, up to 99.97% of pollutants are killed.
To ensure that your air scrubber is cleaning effectively, we recommend getting an air quality monitor. This device will measure your indoor air quality, then report it back to you. Monitors run between $80-110, but this worthy investment helps keep you in the know while your air scrubber is hard at work.
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