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Professor Collins Recommendations for Improving Indoor Air Quality:
- Wear a KN95 or N95 mask if you must be outdoors in the smoke.
- Avoid air cleaning technologies that say they are “active cleaning” methods or add ionization or UV lights to filters. “Most of these techniques are not well tested and in the highly-polluted smokey environment, they may actually do more harm than good — or they may just not work as well as a good old air filter,” Collins says
- If you have central air, replace your filter (MERV 13 would be great) and run the fan continuously. “Most central air systems only move air about 25-30% of the time, and if you’re trying to use the filter in your system to clean the air, the air needs to be moving through it,” Collins says.
- Add an air cleaner if you can. The Corsi-Rosenthal box fan/filter setup is highly effective and far less expensive than commercial air cleaners with comparable capacity.”All you need is four 20-inch furnace filters, a 20-inch box fan, and regular old duct tape, and it runs somewhere around $80 all together,” Collins says.