Does anyone have any recommendations for air purifiers for tobacco smoke? Just when I thought I had finally adjusted to life in Taiwan, I am now being bombarded by tobacco smoke from all of my neighbors in the apartment complex I live in.
Based on some very unscientific searching on the internet, it seems that I need something that uses HEPA filters with activated carbon. I know that even this probably can’t remove all of the contaminates in the air, but I really need to reduce the amount of tobacco smoke floating around in my apartment because it is now getting to the point where my throat and head hurts from breathing the air.
Opening a windows doesn’t help either because people are constantly smoking outside. The apartment is one of those small ones (套房) without a kitchen, so the size is roughly 10-15 meters squared, so a small air purifier could work, but maybe it would be better to get a bigger, more powerful one just to clean the air a bit more?
Basically any air purifier that uses a HEPA filter is going to be fundamentally the same. I have a Honeywell one that works fine. I don’t know if the carbon prefilter is necessary for tobacco smoke, but I use that too (it stacks in front of the HEPA filter). In the US, I used one from SmartAir, but it seems like they don’t ship to Taiwan still?
Lots of complaints about broken/functionless sensors and such on more expensive air purifiers made me opt for a pretty simple one that has low, mid, high or “turbo” for the fan settings + a timer for auto shutoff. In the end, an air purifier is just a fan blowing air through a HEPA filter, so theres really no point in going crazy with higher cost models. Just make sure you have a HEPA filter and not any of the “better than HEPA” nonsense you’ll see.
As for size, they state the number of recommended pings for each model. If you get one bigger than the room size, it’s going to create more circulation, which in turn will give the air more opportunity to pass through the filter.