Shouldn’t we be putting HEPA filters on every air conditioner and heater? Don’t HEPA filters take viruses out of the air?
In: Technology
HEPA filters take damn near *everything* out of the air. [This](https://thecomfortauthority.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Dirty-Filter.jpg) is what a typical air filter out of a home AC unit looks like after I’m guessing around 3 months, which is the recommended time to replace them. That particular filter is pretty dirty so it might be closer to 6 months, it’s hard to tell exactly. When I worked in a small aquarium store we had to change all three filters *every* month and they looked worse than the one in that picture. After two months they would get so clogged that it caused the evaporator coils to freeze.
That’s a filter that only catches pet hair, clumps of dust, fuzzies, and *maybe* pollen if you spend $20 or $40 for the good ones designed to catch it. Pollen is [orders of magnitude larger](https://slideplayer.com/slide/13051742/79/images/6/Sizes+of+biological+particles.jpg) than viruses. So not only is the HEPA filter catching the viruses, it’s catching every single thing larger than the virus that gets caught up in the filter. If all of that stuff *larger* than pollen will clog a filter up that quickly in a commercial setting, you can imagine how much faster they would clog when they have to catch all the particles down to the size of a virus.
That would be an outrageous cost, since HEPA filters are so much more expensive, and they would have to be replaced so much more often. We had three AC units for a *small* store. A large store will have both more units and larger units that require specialized (ie: more expensive) filters.
There isn’t enough benefit to justify that cost. Not all of the air gets circulated all the time, so viruses will still linger. It won’t remove viruses from surfaces. It won’t get rid of the viruses immediately after a sneeze. It really won’t accomplish much.
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