Vacuum Cleaners and Indoor Pollution

Indoor air pollution in America is a serious and often misunderstood problem. Oddly enough, air quality is related to modern construction techniques.

Todays homes are far superior to yesterday homes in terms of insulation and air-tight sealing. While this is great in terms of energy efficiency and keeping pollens, smuts and other pollutants outside, it also ensures that any pollutants already in the home will remain unless removed. We can either open the doors and windows to 'air out' the house, or we will need efficient air filtration equipment.

One of the biggest pollutant offenders is the vacuum cleaner used to clean our homes. If you ever get that dusty or musty odor, especially while vacuuming, it's due to leakage through the vacuum bag and/or filter.

Look around the living room. Is there a fine sheen of dust on the lamp shades, furniture, TV etc? For the most part, this dust was not brought in from the outside. It's simply being recirculated, much of it through vacuuming. Incidentally, this dust can remain airborne for up to 72 hours. Any dust not breathed into our lungs simply settles onto our upholstery and finally back into our carpeting and flooring. Not a pleasant scenario.

Now, in order for air or furnace filters to work, the dust must be airborne and air must be moved through the filtration media. In the meantime, that airborne dust, with all of its nasty ingredients, is in the air that we breathe.

Most of us have heard of HEPA filtration. It's an industry standard acronym, High Efficiency Particle Arrest, developed by government scientists for passive air filtration. The standard is required to capture 99.97% of all airborne particles down to .3 microns. HEPA is used in nearly every vacuum bag and most air filters in the U.S. But here's the inherent problem with HEPA. HEPA was designed for Passive Airflow. Passive Airflow simply means gentle or normal environmental airflow, such as the movement of air in our living room, for example. There is no powerful fan or other device forcing air into the filtration system at a high volume. We don't feel the air currents unless we're sitting in front of a fan, in other words.

However, when HEPA is used in a vacuum cleaner, it is subjected to the powerful exhaust air volume of the vacuum. The resulting airflow quickly clogs the HEPA bag and filter, as well as degrading the material. Once the filtration medium is saturated, or clogged, the machine cannot "breathe".

A thicker air filter can be used in the vacuum, but air flow is reduced. The machine will filter more air but catch even less dirt.

Since airflow is now reduced, the cleaning ability of the vacuum is lessened. More dirt is left in the carpet flooring and the air that does get through is polluted, effectively creating a dust storm. Unless we change our bags and filters very frequently, we are defeating the purpose of vacuuming.
This problem has been solved by some vacuum manufacturers. They use seven layers of an advanced Electrostatic polypropylene microfiber, along with HEPA, designed to allow full airflow without clogging, and filter down to .3 microns, about the size of a staph bacteria!

With this new technology, the dirt never becomes airborne in the first place, yet virtually every grain of soil and contamination is removed from the home by the vacuum, making a much cleaner and healthier environment, virtually allergen free. For more information on this subject, visit your local vacuum dealer.