Ok it’s true, the BAM Air design isn’t going to win any beauty contests. And it’s relatively large compared to other units like Austin Air, IQAir, and a myriad of other options mostly from China. They are kinda pretty. BAM Air is a box. Some of them have phone apps. BAM Air does not. Some have cool LCD displays for selecting fan speeds and such. BAM Air does not. BAM Air be butt ugly on the outside. It’s utilitarian. It’s simple. It solves a different problem. Even the name is direct and plain.
This will improve over time. Maybe. We are focused on performance first moving more highly filtered air than any other system available under the $2,500-$5,000 price point. You see having a filtration system that runs 24/7 in your bedroom that maintains a certain level of air quality is one thing. Assuming that these claims are actually true, some are, some not so much. Measuring this with test gear, mostly it’s a slow curve of improvement and requires higher fan speeds than most people run because of noise. So if you run it on low all the time, it’s not that great. Better than nothing perhaps, but that’s not our target.
Building a machine that can clear the air in a classroom, office, or restaurant in 5 to 15 minutes, and keep it that way for hour after hour with a lot of mouths spewing new contaminants constantly, well that’s a different story altogether. It’s all about how much air you can move through the filters. Period. If you aren’t changing the air in the room every few minutes (as opposed to 2-3 times an hour) it simply isn’t enough. That’s the truth. The reason you don’t hear this from manufacturers is that it’s very expensive to build a unit that can do this. And making it quiet enough to actually be turned on adds even more cost. And then there’s the marketing cost, sales commission, distributor markups, and a myriad of other factors that bring the cost of that unit into the multiple thousands of dollars.
Let’s be clear, I’m not saying that it isn’t worth it. If you need clean air in an operating room, that’s not a good place to try to save a nickel. The reality is that these solutions just won’t find their way into a classroom. Teachers are still buying supplies out of their own pocket in many cases (but that’s a separate rant) so it’s delusional to think that funding for an effective solution will suddenly appear.
Let’s look at what’s really needed, and the real world specs to provide that.
Room Size and CFM
Take a room that is 25 feet wide and 30 feet long. It has a 10 foot ceiling. This room contains 7,500 cubic feet of air. One measurement of output for an air system is CFM, or Cubic Feet per Minute. We’ll look at other specs later that represent performance such as CADR (clean air delivery rate). For now we’ll stick with CFM.
Now we need to decide how often we want to process the air in the room. Let’s say we want to filter all the air every 5 minutes. The simple math for this is: 7500 divided by 5 = required CFM, or 7500/5=1500 CFM. That friends is a lot of HEPA filtered air. The pressure that these filters impose on fans is significant. It’s measured in inches of water, but we’ll look at that another time. For now we’ll assume the actual CFM output is constant and post filtration.
A HEPA 14 filter that is capable of allowing 1500 CFM of air flow is BIG. And we can measure ‘BIG’ as the square feet of filter material. So maybe it’s 36 inches tall by 24 inches wide and 6 inches deep. Or perhaps it’s 24 inches wide by 24 inches tall, and 12 inches deep. This isn’t negotiable. It’s math. The material allows what it allows, and if you need to push ‘x’ number of CFMs through it, you must have a minimum number of square feet of material available. So claims of big performance in small quiet packages for under $500 are simply NOT true.
So yeah, BAM Air is butt ugly. But it does clean a sh!t ton of air. That’s another spec we’ll look at later. 🙂
Stay safe out there, and be kind to yourself and others ok?