Healthy Indoors Magazine - USA Edition

HI Jan-Feb 2022 USA Edition

Healthy Indoors Magazine

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34 | January/February 2022 The DIY box fan air cleaner known as the Corsi-Rosenthal Box (or the Comparetto Cube, in a slight variation) has really taken off in the fight against COVID. The fan is round, but the housing is square. At the corners, some of the air will be going the other direction. To im- prove air flow and eliminate that bypass, you can make a shroud out of cardboard to cover the corners. That's what I did differently when I changed the filters on mine yesterday. See the photo at the top of the article. Jim Rosenthal has an article all about the box fan air cleaner shroud. Creativity Abounds Just today I found another variation on the DIY box fan air cleaner. The photo below is from Canada Strong Masks and uses two filters that are larger than the standard 20" x 20" filters used in the 4 or 5 filter versions. In a tweet, they say they place them 7 feet off the floor and blow- ing the air upward to reduce noise. and offices. Parents and teachers have had their students make them as class projects. It's been the subject of quite a few news stories. It even got the Idea of the Year Award from the Waterloo Filtration Institute. There's also a Wikipedia page for the Corsi-Rosenthal Box, which I discovered just today as I was researching for this article. And Ask This Old House covered it in a show, too. This is all great! We need more of these things. Improve Filtration When I made my first Comparetto Cube in 2020, I copied the design I had seen online. But that early design isn't fully optimized because there's some bypass at the fan. The photo below shows a red circle highlighting the area through which the fan moves the air. The DIY box fan air cleaner has some bypass at the corners of the box fan. If you haven't made your own DIY box fan air cleaner yet, why not? It looks like we're stuck with COVID for a while longer. But even when COVID is gone, these devices are great for improving your indoor air quality. And they're especially great for those of you who live in places that get smokey from wildfires. Related Articles How to Make a High-MERV DIY Portable Air Cleaner COVID Is Airborne — Are You Feeling Lucky? 3 Ways to Get Cleaner Indoor Air With Filtration IAQ Research-Practice in Action: The Corsi/Rosenthal Box Air Cleaner by Jim Rosenthal of TexAir Filters Allison Bailes Allison Bailes III,PhD is a speaker, writer, building science consul- tant, and founder of Energy Vanguard in Decatur, Georgia. He is also writing a book on building science. You can follow him on Twitter at @EnergyVanguard. Two filter variation of the DIY box fan air cleaner. May's Ways Continued from previous page

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