A frugal portable air cleaner

[Kaleva]

Many of you may have already seen farminator3000's post in GD but I'll repost it here so it stays up for awhile. A simple but great idea!

Link to thread in GD:

"buy a 20 inch box fan (lasko is good)

buy a 20 x 20 furnace filter

it says on the label what pollutants the filter removes

this is the cool part-
duct/duck tape the filter to the intake side of the fan. ..."

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022065439

[Curmudgeoness]

1. Wow, don't check DU for a few days,

and you really miss some cool shit. Me likey.

[dimbear]

2. This is kind of obvious, but to make it cool too, spread a wet towel over the intake.

Have to keep dampening it, but if you get just a few scorching days a year this works.

[Kaleva]

3. Another great idea!

It takes a lot of btus (heat) to change water from a liquid to a vapor.

[Shankapotomus]

4. If you're not adverse to running your tap,

you can coil some malleable copper piping around the intake and connect one end to your cold running tap and let the other drain back into a sink and you don't have to replace the towel anymore. You do have to run your tap, though.

[Kaleva]

5. One could use a couple of gallon milk jugs filled with ice

If one has a chest or standup freezer, fill some clean gallon jugs part way with water (to allow for expansion) and put them in the freezer to turn to ice. After they froze, take one or more of the jugs and put them either behind or in front of the box fan but make sure they are placed in a shallow, leak proof container as water vapor in the air will condense on them. One can later use the condensate to water plants with. Keep one or more extra jugs of frozen water in the freezer to quickly replace the jugs that had thawed out so one doesn't have to wait for the jugs that contained melted ice to freeze again.

One could use quart milk jugs if one doesn't have the freezer space to handle gallon jugs.

It takes 144 Btus to change 1 lb. of water at 32 degrees into 1 lb. of water at 32 degrees. One gallon of water weighs approx. 8.35 pounds. One quart weighs approx. 2 pounds. It takes 1 Btu to raise the temperature of one pound of water one degree.

As one can see, it takes many more Btus to change the state of water then it does to change the temperature so having jugs of cold water in front or back of a box fan doesn't do much good except to act as a dehumidifier.

[Kaleva]

6. Ex wife gave me a HoMedics portable air cleaner...

but a new replacement filter for that costs about $50! However, I saw some 3-M Filtrete 1000 filters on sale at the local hardware store, bought one and being very careful in taking apart the cardboard trim, I cut the filter and cardboard trim to size so it'd fit within the unit. The 20"X25"x1" filter I bought for $12.50 plus sales tax was large enough to cut into three the size that the portable air filter unit would accept.

Just an idea but some of you may be able to find a portable air cleaner for sale for cheap at a garage sale or thrift store and rather then purchasing the very expensive replacement filters, just purchase a good quality furnace filter when they are on sale and modify it to fit. It will do the job and will look much better then a box fan with a filter duct taped to it.