No matter how often we clean, the minute we turn around, there’s dust on our furniture again. While dust may be an unfortunate reality of daily life, there are ways to reduce the amount of dust that accumulates in your home.
Home air purifiers are great at helping reduce dust in the home. To better understand exactly how they work, it helps to understand just what dust really is. Even though dust seems to be an even layer of light dirt as it settles on surfaces, dust is a collection of several different types of particles from many different sources.
Household dust is as unique as its individual household. In my house, for example, our dust no doubt contains pet dander, pollen, bird feathers and dust, and many other items from our farm. There should be very little tobacco smoke if any, since no one in our family smokes. However, there could be cooking residue from my slightly burned lasagna dinner. For the average family, dust will contain indoor and outdoor particles.
Outdoor contaminants include mold spores, pollen, and even pesticides or smoke. Indoor irritants maybe our skin and hair cells, pet fur and dander, food particles, and insect by-products. Some of these particles are incredibly small, while others are relatively large. Dust mites, for example, while seemingly tiny to the naked eye, are actually large when it comes to dust, ranging between 100 to 300 microns in size. Some pollen can be as large as 1000 microns, while others can be as tiny as 10 microns. Some face powders can be as small as .1 microns. At the same time, toxic chemical residue such as cigarette smoke can be as tiny as .01 microns.
Does air purifier remove dust?
All these tiny particles floating around our homes eventually settle on the surfaces and turn into dust. When we add a home air purifier to a room, many airborne particles will be trapped by the air purifier before settling on surfaces. This does two things. It makes the air cleaner and fresher and reduces the accumulation of dust on the surfaces in our homes.
The best tool for filtering air dust is a true HEPA air filter. HEPA filters were first designed in the 1940s. They were used to protect the scientists working on the Manhattan Project from tiny radioactive particles. These filters were so effective that they were soon being used commercially. A true HEPA filter is rated to capture particles up to .3 microns small with 99.97% efficiency. Realistically, a true HEPA filter can capture smaller particles, as well. This .3 micron size is the standard since this is the hardest size to trap and is the size that is most easily drawn into the lungs.
As a home air purifier pulls air from a room, it also pulls the tiny particles of matter floating in the air, including dust. These particles pass through the air purifier’s filters, trapped within the fibers. While no home air purifier can remove all of the dust within a home’s air, with regular use, an air purifier can certainly help reduce the amount of dust within a home.
