If you don’t have central air, or you have it and want to augment your system’s ability to clear the air, consider buying a portable air cleaner with a high-efficiency particulate air, or HEPA, filter, which can remove almost all particles of the tiny size found in smoke.
You can put it in the room you use most during the day, then move it to your bedroom at night. If the smoke gets really bad, put it in the room of your choice and stay there as much as possible.
“If you have an appropriately sized air cleaner with a true HEPA filter and you put it in a room and close the doors and windows, you have clean air really fast,” says Sarah Coefield, an air quality specialist with the Missoula City-County Health Department in Montana, which has had its share of wildfire smoke in recent years.
If you have kids, or share the home with other people, you should ideally have one air cleaner for each bedroom. Alternatively, you may need to put everyone in one room at night during a smoke emergency.
Portable HEPA air cleaners cost anywhere from under $100 to over $1,000, depending in part on the number of square feet they can clean effectively. To clean a room, you can get a perfectly good one for under $200.
All air cleaning devices sold in California must be certified by the California Air Resources Board, which posts a list of air cleaners it has certified. You might also want to look at Consumer Reports’ list of best and worst air cleaners and at a review of those selected by The New York Times’ product review website, Wirecutter.
Public health experts warn that you should avoid devices that are sold as air cleaners but actually emit ozone, the main component of smog. The air resources board also publishes a list of ozone-emitting devices.
Gina Spadafori, a resident of West Sacramento, has both a central HVAC system with an extra-thick filter and a portable HEPA air cleaner she keeps in her bedroom. Spadafori, 63, has serious asthma and has long been concerned about the air quality in her house.
In recent years, she has endured numerous days of hazardous wildfire smoke and that has changed the way she uses her HVAC. “I probably use the fan-only setting more than I have in the past to just filter the air rather than heating or cooling it,” she says.
On bad air days, she turns the portable air cleaner on an hour before she goes to bed and closes the door so it will “super-clean that air” and she’ll get a good night’s sleep. “It’s just sort of a second line of defense,” she says.
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