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> an increasing portion of the particulate matter that people are exposed to is unregulated
We need to not only fine the fires, but tax them, too, to make sure they're paying their fair share. Also we need at least another thousand pages of regulations.
> an increasing portion of the particulate matter that people are exposed to is unregulated Are these serious people?
> an increasing portion of the particulate matter that people are exposed to is unregulated
Unfortunately, both serious people and unserious people are being exposed.
I think a significant part of the problem is that the research was done at Stanford, near the epicenter of the most unregulated forest fires.
No, these people are not serious people. Stanford University is where we find people like Mark Z. Jacobson, people that suggest we don't need nuclear fission power to lower CO2 emissions and sustain our economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Serious people take a close look at Jacobson's paper and see how impractical his proposal really is, not pay him to be a professor. I have little doubt that Jacobson was involved in this study on air quality since this is the kind of thing the Wikipedia article says he studied as a PhD candidate.
The last big fires in Northern California, the air was so bad I was doubled over coughing unable to do anything but struggle for air. After a few minutes of that I was at the point where 911 was becoming a serious thought but then realized I couldn't have managed to dial.
Same day I ordered quality air purifiers for every room in the house. Worth every penny. I also bought air quality meters, too, so I can be sure the purifiers were doing something more than placebo effect.
I show my out of state friends the outdoors pictures I took at noon where everything is dark and the sky is orange, to give them an idea how bad it was that year.
They're not the most fun to breathe in, but a properly fitted N95 is actually useful against wildfire smoke, too. I wouldn't want to wear one all day in the house, air purifiers are great for that, but they're helpful if you have to go outside.
Beauty of covid is that no one will even give you a sideways look for wearing one now.
DIY option: https://www.seattletimes.com/n... [seattletimes.com]
Might be paywalled. Basically you build a box one wall of which is a box fan and the rest of which are MERV 13 furnace filters.
N95s help for real when going outdoors in it. A friend in Australia escalated to a dual-cartridge HEPA respirator when it got so bad she could not see across the street.
California contains California known to the State of California to cause California.
Wild fire smoke is bad and all but try breathing the smoke that comes from a significantly sized neighborhood burning down near you (happened to me in California in 2017). I shudder to think of the damage done to me by a week of breathing in the toxic mix of burnt insulation and plastic.
I've been huffing basically all of the major fires in the Northwest and I can tell you it's quite unpleasant. We've recently had some smoke down from Oregon, too. This year I put in a duct fan with a carbon filter to push air into the house when it's smoky, or when the neighbors are doing their dryer sheet stink laundry, and it's made a big improvement.
You know what else is unraveling air quality gains?
The hordes of homeless in my town running generators 24x7 and cooking over campfires burning whatever garbage they come across. Not to mention their dilapidated RVs leaking oil and other auto fluids and their feces and urine running into the river.
You know what else is unraveling air quality gains? The hordes of homeless in my town running generators 24x7 and cooking over campfires burning whatever garbage they come across. Not to mention their dilapidated RVs leaking oil and other auto fluids and their feces and urine running into the river.
You know what else is unraveling air quality gains?
The hordes of homeless in my town running generators 24x7 and cooking over campfires burning whatever garbage they come across. Not to mention their dilapidated RVs leaking oil and other auto fluids and their feces and urine running into the river.
Yeah, give them jobs so they can pollute like us normal people.
Yeah, give them jobs so they can pollute like us normal people.
Yeah, give them jobs so they can pollute like us normal people.
Yes, because there's no difference. Using your gaming PC for a few hours is the same as pouring motor oil in the creek.
Don't forget the exploding propane tanks.
You do understand how evolution works, right? Our lungs are not substantially different than they were 500 years ago.
500 years ago, Native Americans had been burning the forests to manage undergrowth for thousands of years. And then the Europeans came. From a hardy stock that burned open peat fires inside their cottages. For thousands of years.
Always these attempts to minimize the current crisis. Denying reality doesn't magically make it go away. It's time you grew up.
"We believe we have evolved beyond the need for fire."
That surely explains why outdoor cooking is so unpopular. /sarcasm
As the regulations around polluting are peeled back until they're completely ineffectual, the smoke from forest fires will eventually just be a line item on the master list of environmental dangers, not particular significant in context.
My wife and I bought a house a couple years ago and have lived in it for over a year now. We had it remodeled before we moved in, and one of the things we upgraded was the ventilation.
Before, it had a natural gas furnace, and a weird hacked switch in the coat closet that could turn on just the air blower without running heat. (Presumably for use when the house was warm... no air conditioning.)
Now it has a heat pump, and a "heat recovery ventilator" (HRV), and a pre-filter before the HRV.
The heat pump accepts a large disposable filter, and supports MERV [wikipedia.org] 13 filters. It circulates the air multiple times through the filter during the day.
The HRV dumps stale indoor air from the house to the outside, and brings in an equal volume of fresh air from the outside. It runs stale and fresh air past each other in a heat exchanger, so if you have been spending energy to heat or cool the house, you recover some of that benefit.
The pre-filter is a simple box that holds a 20" x 10" filter on a diagonal inside the box. One 6" duct in, one 6" duct out, one filter in the middle. It supports MERV 13 filters also.
The effect of all the above is that the air in our house is better than we ever had before in any home. I have been surprised by how much I have noticed the difference and how much I like it.
It's forest fire season right now, and the area where I live has had a lot of wood smoke in the air from a fire northeast of us. I have both an outdoor and an indoor air quality sensor. When the outdoor has been measuring unhealthy air quality, the indoor consistently has shown healthy air. For example, when the outdoor sensor showed 199, the indoor was 31. For most days the outdoor has been varying from the 60's to the 170's and indoor has been 11 or lower. The absolute worst I have seen was about 270 outdoors (just for part of one day) and it went to 61 indoors. (Anything below 50 is healthy air; 61 is very mild concern. Over 200 is pretty bad... when it hit 270 the smoke was visible like heavy fog.)
So, if you ever need to have any work done on your home's HVAC system, maybe take that opportunity to put in a few filters.
P.S. I also got a HEPA filter, but it made a lot of noise, and I turned it off and removed the HEPA filter cartridge. So that's money I wish I hadn't spent. MERV 13 can take out smoke particles and in practice seems to be doing a great job for use; the HEPA wasn't necessary.
Before, it had a natural gas furnace, and a weird hacked switch in the coat closet that could turn on just the air blower without running heat. (Presumably for use when the house was warm... no air conditioning.)
Before, it had a natural gas furnace, and a weird hacked switch in the coat closet that could turn on just the air blower without running heat. (Presumably for use when the house was warm... no air conditioning.)
It is called a "summer switch" and keeps the fan running to balance out the temperature between rooms (assuming you have both inlets and outlets in them). My very old house has gas heat and central AC and I still find keeping the fan running all the time reduces variability throughout the house.
It is called a "summer switch" and keeps the fan running to balance out the temperature between rooms (assuming you have both inlets and outlets in them).
Our home had one single, giant air intake on the ground floor in the middle of the house. Then a small air outlet in each room... all in the ceilings for the ground level, all in the floor for the upper level. The giant air intake was just a grille over a hole cut into the wall by the garage, and the furnace was on the other side of that wall. There's a
When the contractors remodeled the house, the first thing they did was pull down the drywall of the soffit and expose the ducts and wiring.
They found that the ducts had been installed by putting screws through the sheet metal and into structural wood of the house. Best practice is to not have little holes where conditioned air can leak away, so they put some kind of sealer (maybe simply epoxy glue) on each of the screw points. The ducts themselves were fine and they left them in place, but the HVAC guys i
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