What should I look for in an air purifier?
The
most efficient free standing units, including the NQ
Commercial Clarifier, are designed to force air upward toward the
office ceiling and then take the return low at the unit's base. This
creates a full pattern of circulation, during which most of the room
air passes through the unit's cleaning system for decontamination.
The engineering logic of such a system is fairly simple. Yet the air
cleaning industry is rife with purported "solutions" that violate
the first tenet of air cleaning, that is: that no device can remove
a contaminant that doesn't reach it in the first place.
Another tenet is that no one air-cleaning technology can address all
the different types of contamination present in office air. For fine
particulates, the best technology is to use a properly pre-filtered
HEPA filter. True HEPA filters are designed to remove 99.97% of all
particles as small as 0.3 microns (a micron is 1/25,400 of an inch),
effectively taking all particulates out of the air.
For odor removal, the best technology is a filter system combining carbon
and potassium permanganate. The most efficient filters have a high density
of the carbon potassium blend, and are designed so that the "residence
time" during which the contaminated air passes through the filter system
is maximized. Avoid carbon impregnated panels or pleated filters that
don't meet this efficiency criteria.
Furthermore, because carbon adsorbs up to one-third of its weight
in most odor causing gases before saturation, the useful life of a
pad-type filters is very short.
The best solution for removing biologically active hazards is to expose
indoor air to ultraviolet light. UV light is a long-proven technology
that, when properly engineered into an air purification system, is
capable of destroying virtually any airborne disease-causing contaminant.
Only the NQ Commercial
Clarifier combines all these traits in a compact, self contained,
energy efficient unit.
