Ionic air purifiers
 

Does anyone here have an ionic air purifier? I tried them years ago, but discovered they turned my walls black. Are the new ones any better or do they still make particulate matter adhere to the walls?

Ron
http://germanstar.net

Epinions.com probably has some good consumer reviews about these. I think alot of people liked them, but they had to be cleaned often because they would get noisy.

I had a top of the line Sharper Image Ionizer, but switched to a Living Air Classic. Comparing the two, I highly recommend the Living Air unit

According to Consumer Reports, the best ones use a HEPA type filter.

We have a room size unit that does help take out dog dander, but the replacement filters are hard to find and cost over $20 each.

In addition, I've been using the $16 3M Filtrete filters in our central air unit, and they do the whole house. We change the filter every 4 to 6 weeks, so there is some cost there too.

We do find that the $16 Filtrete filter is much better than the 50 cent filters that you can buy, and somewhat better than the $10 Filtrete filters.
The Sharper Image unit doesn't have a fan, so its coverage is quite limited.

Just got an Ionic Breeze Quadra!
 

We just LOVE it! Does everything they claim it will do. The little "bonus" bathroom unit works fantastic, too. No filters to buy.

It was $20 off, the bonus unit was free and you could buy a 2nd one for 50% off, which we did & sent to my Mom for her 86th birthday.

She still smokes a half-pack per day! :eek:

The absolute proof, to my way of thinking, is that I've never seen a used one advertized for sale...:cool:

I have a BIOZONE, which I bought from a fellow forum member who sells them. Do a search under air purifiers and you'll find a very informative thread (started by Eric) about them.

I've been very happy with mine and have used it regularly now for almost a year.

We've got one of those Ionic Breeze things here. It really does get noticeably noisy if it needs cleaned, but the good side to that is that I can watch some bluish sparky stuff bounce around between the metal uprights. Clean it, no noise and no bluish plasma. Anyhow, it works OK but we're not incredibly impressed by it. If we had it to do over, we'd probably get a more active system.

It all boils down to ... are we dealing with so many CFM of air handling through a tangible, expensive, and replaceable filter, vs. an ozone generator (I thought ozone wasn't necessarily *good* for you) or a snake-oil air "ionizer".
Our Honeywell is a good unit but the HEPA filters just cost us like $18 or so. This filter has about as much square footage as our whole house 16" x 25" filter. Both the Honeywell room unit's, and my whole house central filters, both do get gray over time, showing me they are removing something.
We gave a Honeywell filter to a relative who hasn't changed his filter in 6 years.
He just inquired about replacing his filter.
Weird.
One thing I just learned about is candles.
According to my one relative's duct cleaning person, burning candles produce a soot that is almost impossible to remove via a duct cleaning service.