Home Forums FineTunedMac Community Lounge Air conditioners

deniro's spot-on observations about product degradation - and he hasn't even touched on food - prompted me write this heads-up to air conditioner users.

I bought an 11 EER rated air conditioner a few years ago, and after about a year and a half of my house being considerably dirtier than it had been with the 10 EER it had replaced I woke up and realized that Frigidaire had achieved 11 by degrading the filter to the point at which it didn't do very much filtering. (When the "240 hours" light came on and I expected it to be really dirty, virtually nothing washed out when I held it under running water.)

I remedied that by cutting the filter material out of its frame and replacing it by gluing on the same sort of foam (3/16"...couldn't find 1/4") that my 10 had had, and VOILA my house was cleaner almost instantly. (Duco Cement works, but it takes some effort to get it to stick right.)

Last week, a cleaner, happier year later, I noticed some hair and stuff that had gotten behind the filter and tried to vacuum it away, and I was horrified to discover that there was dust packed so tightly between the vanes that it took a good brushing with a toothbrush to get it out.

The bottom line is that my 11 EER rated air conditioner (Yours, too?) may have been honestly rated in terms of its out-of-the-box power consumption, but that 11 began decreasing, perhaps to even less than 10 eventually, the second I turned it on, and beyond that fraudulent aspect, the dust between the vanes that was making the machine work harder was also slowly becoming an unrecognized fire hazard.

A cheap way to keep the air in your house clean is buy a box fan or two ($20 ea at home depot or walmart) and buy a BOX of 20x20x1 pleated air filters. Stick the fans somewhere out of the way, leave then on high, with a filter on their intake side. (metal reinforcing screen facing the fan) They will filter and keep your air in the house clean. You can easily see when the filters need to be replaced, and your furnace filter AND furnace duct work will require less changing/cleaning.

I know a few people locally that do this but they construct "filter boxes" by attaching several filters together in a cube shape on the intake side of such a fan, and use HEPA class filters. LOT more expensive to do though, but those people have major allergies and use that to keep the air in their house super clean, and it really helps them.

Then I read last year that this is becoming a big thing in China where air pollution is getting really bad. People are making these "cube filter boxes" to clean the air in their small apartments even.

They go with five filters (+fan, so there's your six sided cube) to increase the total airflow through the filters. My method of just laying one filter on the intake side is much less airtight and can't filter as much air, but I don't need HEPA-class filtering in my house.