Strategies for Improving Home Air Quality with Mike Feldstein

October 31, 2023

107. Strategies for Improving Home Air Quality with Mike Feldstein

Do you know if the air quality in your house is good, or could it be causing you health problems? In this episode, host George Siegal explores the often-overlooked issue of indoor air quality with guest Mike Feldstein, a specialist in fire, flood, mold restoration, and air quality consulting. 

Mike sheds light on the common misconception that many homeowners have about the air they breathe within their houses. The discussion highlights how humans quickly adapt to the air around them, making it difficult to notice air quality problems that may exist. Mike goes on to discuss the hidden dangers of indoor air pollution, emphasizing the factors that can impact air quality, including humidity, allergens, wildfire smoke, pollen, pollution from urban environments, and indoor sources like cooking and cleaning products. 

The episode offers valuable insights into the importance of addressing indoor air quality and the range of options available for homeowners to breathe better and live healthier lives.

Here’s how you can follow Mike:

Website:  https://jaspr.co/ 

Pre-Order book: https://www.paulownia-la.com/book/

Important information from Homeowners Be Aware:

Here are ways you can follow us on-line:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/homeownersbeaware/

Website: https://homeownersbeaware.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-siegal/

If you'd like to reach me for any reason, here's the link to my contact form:

https://homeownersbeaware.com/contact

Here's the link to the trailer for the documentary film I'm making: Built to Last: Buyer Beware.

🎧 If you enjoyed this episode, don't keep it to yourself! Share it with your friends and help spread the knowledge. Remember to hit the like button, subscribe for more insightful content, and leave a review to let us know your thoughts. Your support means the world to us! 🌟

Thanks for listening!

Transcript

George Siegal: 0:00

Thank you for joining me on this week's Homeowners Be Aware podcast. Let's clear the air about something that might be a problem in your house. In this case, we might need to literally clear the air, because there are a lot of homes that have issues with air quality. My guest today is Mike Feldstein. Mike's experience with fire, flood, mold restoration and air quality consulting has led him to create air quality related products to help people breathe better, sleep better and live better in their homes. I'm George Siegal, and this is Homeowners Be Aware, the podcast that teaches you everything you need to know about being a homeowner. Mike. Thank you so much for joining me today. My pleasure, hey. So most people, when they move into a house, they might know the air quality in the community. They see those warnings all the time. They might know if their CO2 detector goes off, but in terms of just overall air quality, a lot of people probably don't think about it, do they?

Mike Feldstein: 1:01

They don't, not even a little bit. It's kind of like the human body is very good at adapting to our environment and the way that everybody can understand is if you ever go into someone's house that just kind of smells a little bit funny whether it's a dog or a cleaning product or maybe a little musty or damp typically within 20 or 30 minutes you don't tend to smell it anymore. You get very used to whatever that odor may be. And that isn't just with smells. Our bodies and our senses are really good at doing that with all kinds of things. So typically we can be in heavily contaminated air and not really notice it. An analogy also like is what water is to fish, air is to people, and I always wonder if fish often realize that they're in polluted water or not, or because they're immersed in the water. They have no clue and I think it's quite the same for us.

George Siegal: 1:53

Yeah, and probably you know people. I guess a great example is when you make dinner and then you go out for a walk or something and you come back and you go gosh, my house really smells. I mean, you just get used to it and you don't. The odor kind of just goes into the background. It sure does.

Mike Feldstein: 2:09

So what are some of the dangerous?

George Siegal: 2:10

things we need to worry about, then. What are the things that are going on in my house that I don't know about, besides smelling the bacon or whatever is cooking? What do I need to be concerned about?

Mike Feldstein: 2:22

Well, first, the things that you can smell and taste and see is just sort of the tip of the service. Most of the things, when it comes to air, you can't see, you can't see, you can't smell, you can't really detect it at all. And when you smell like when you talked about, like smelling the bacon what happens is those air particles, not just that we breathe them, but all of the porous materials in our house, like carpets, clothing, insulation, touches, mattresses, all of those porous surfaces that can absorb water also can absorb any of the particulates, VOCs or odors from the air. So if it's passing through your home and there's porous, spongy materials that are organic, it is absorbing all of that particulate. So it depends. You kind of have two buckets of air problems outdoor air and indoor air. Indoor pollution and outdoor air pollution. We always talk about pollution as if it's just that outside thing. But the outside air is what fills our indoor environments and since around the 70s, when there was a huge push for energy efficient, energy efficient homes, net zero, passive, et cetera, we built our homes so tight to keep the cool blend in the summer, keep the warm in the winter and energy efficiency and it really tight seal, as often at odds with fresh air and ventilation.

Mike Feldstein: 3:48

But to answer your question, the things that we should be thinking about, they depend a little bit on our region.

Mike Feldstein: 3:54

So in a humid environment, like coastal towns often are, places near the Great Lakes have a lot of humidity, which is more likely to have mold. Some regions used to be the West Coast Now it's seemingly everywhere has to worry about wildfire, smoke. A lot of area I'm in Austin, Texas, Central Texas has horrible pollen and cedar, so there's a really a lot of allergens. A lot of people don't know that there's often more pollen in your home than outside, because it comes in but it can't get back out. And the other one is urban environments. So whether that's the salt on the winter streets or the neighbor across the street who has a contractor there that's cutting two by fours, or the barbecue, outside pollution, traffic, industrial manufacturing, et cetera. And then on the indoor side we have cooking, of course is a huge one. We have cleaning products, we have off gassing from our furniture, from our beds, we have formaldehyde, so it can be a little bit intimidating, but broadly, most things that we're creating and consuming have some pollution effect.

George Siegal: 5:04

Well, here's what I see as a challenge for people checking that. It's like when I move into a house or buy a house, there are so many things I'm hit with financially, and the things I tend to fix or address first are the ones that you can visually see With the air quality, since you don't see it. When I've had builders or realtors say, well, you should check that, or somebody gives me advice to check it, I'm looking at what that costs and I'm going gosh, I just don't smell anything. So how should I really be thinking about that? And then what would a test involve doing?

Mike Feldstein: 5:38

So I'm not always in favor of testing and this is someone who's owned an air testing company for almost 10 years now because a lot of the time the the data is stuff that we kind of already knew. It's like who moves into a house. Often people don't do a water test but they still get a Brita, or they still use the fridge filter, or they notice all of their their pipes and their dishes look white and their their showers calcifying so that they get a water softener, because these all either become visual issues or because the cost to improve water, like water quality awareness, is probably 10 to 20 years I would say it was 20 years before COVID and it's probably close to about 10 years ahead of air. Now In a lot of the world, especially Asia, this is a well-known, well-documented issue. You would never, in a lot of parts of Asia, go into a restaurant or a clinic or a mall and not see air purifiers. They literally have air purifier stores in the malls there, so their air awareness is much more mature at this point.

Mike Feldstein: 6:41

So I often think a test is often a moot point, especially like you're gonna spend 500 or a thousand or more, depending where you go, and I often think it's actually just better for people to invest in the solutions themselves, because often you put your budget into testing and Like no matter what if you there's no city water. The only city water I've ever seen that's excellent is Lake Tahoe, and I'm sure there's other places out there. But generally city water, especially on a large scale, it's difficult to be efficient with water and kill all the bacteria that's gonna make you sick and all the other things in there and not contaminate the water. And when it comes to air, we wouldn't even have that filtration process at the government or the municipal level or anything. We just we breathe it straight from the source. So I I think long term we're gonna start to see a demand for better construction.

Mike Feldstein: 7:33

When building a home from scratch doesn't cost a whole lot more to make a home that's pretty great at energy efficiency and also pretty great at Environmental stuff like the water and the air and the dust and things like that. When you're retrofitting, everything costs a lot more in a retrofit setting and Also people have to kind of weigh this against other costs, like the home inspector comes into your home and Is mostly triaging for things that are gonna hurt your wallet like the age of the furnace, a leaky roof, you know old poly be plumbing or old electrical HVAC upgrades, water heaters, things like that. There's very little part of the home inspection that is looking at the home from the perspective of this. Is this home actually healthy For the occupants, whether that's the lighting, the air, the water, that's really not part of the way, and I got certified in home inspecting when I got into air a decade ago just to see what the training was and the regulations and things like that, and I was Surprised has an outsider coming into the space?

Mike Feldstein: 8:36

That it was kind of all financially driven. It's like how much money are you gonna have to pay in the next three to six months to get this home up to a standard? But there was no thought of like is this home making me sick, either acutely, today? People always want to solve problems that are harming us today, but we don't usually want to solve those like low leaks and trickles that are gonna harm us over the next several decades. So it's kind of my long-winded answer.

George Siegal: 9:04

No, that's a good answer. So if I was, I move into a house. It's a. We'll put a range 2,500 square feet to 4,000 square feet. I have these air filters in each room, a unit that sits in the corner of each room Trying to remember the name, and it's too far out of my eyesight to be able to tell you what it is, but we have them in each room. What are you looking at to do to improve the air in your house? What kind of investment is that? Is the average for a homeowner.

Mike Feldstein: 9:33

Yeah, and it's a really. It's an interesting scale that people have to prioritize or sort of like a scale of like whether it's like wealth or budget, or also the health and wealth is kind of that intersection. So if someone has a lot of disposable income and values clean air and water, they may want to invest in all the best stuff. But also if someone doesn't have a lot of money maybe they have an asthmatic child or severe allergies or a cancer diagnosis then it makes sense to shift that budget from maybe that paint job or that new comfy couch to investing in air and water. Saying that Dr Pompa, who's a good detox specialist, talks about is you can't detox your body if you don't detox your home. So if you're trying to take all these supplements and remedies and paying thousands of doctors to detox yourself but you're sleeping in a toxic environment, it's not really going to work too good. So it also depends on the aesthetic right. So you're going to pay for performance, but you're all going to pay for aesthetic and mitigating noise. So there are some air purifiers. Like you can make an air purifier for under $100 by buying a few box fans and sticking some big furnace filters on them that are fairly effective, like way more effective than most of the $200 and $300 air purifiers. However, they're very loud, they're very large and they're very ugly. So if you live in a wildfire area and you're only using it sort of to combat wildfire smoke a few weeks per year, then someone may look at it kind of that way.

Mike Feldstein: 11:10

But generally for somebody to outfit their environment wholly, the big sort of four pillars now that people look at are air, water, mold and EMF is now really quickly emerging in a way that's really surprised me. How many of our customers and potential customers ask about EMF is shocking. Now, way more than energy efficiency or cost is EMF considerations. So from a water perspective, you and then you know some people own their homes and some don't. So that's one of the changes.

Mike Feldstein: 11:45

If you're going to use plug and play point of use solutions versus sort of whole home HVAC solutions. So on a water filtration level, typically around that $3,000 to $10,000 budget, depending on the problems if it's chlorine or if it's hard water is kind of the water budget. The air budget I typically see ERVs or HRVs can be in that $3,000 to $5,000 range installed. You can spend a little like on the lower range. But if you want a good one that has filtration in it as well, it could be in that $3,000 to $5,000 range, and then to outfit an entire home with high quality air purifiers can also be in that $3,000 to $5,000 range.

George Siegal: 12:29

So are you talking about one system that pulls air out of the entire house and works with it, or the units that you put in each room individually? Good point.

Mike Feldstein: 12:40

I didn't clarify that. So the ERV or HRV would traditionally be an HVAC style unit and that's not designed to clean the air. That's designed to make sure that you have adequate fresh air and ventilation. Buildings have fresh air intakes and ventilation systems and a lot of higher standards because they're more densely populated. The CO2 is higher because us humans, right we consume oxygen and we breathe that CO2. Hvac systems aren't really designed for a huge increase of indoor population, so sometimes it's a bathroom fan. It could be a quiet range hood, but just ensuring adequate ventilation. That's sort of more on the HVAC built into the home side For air purification.

Mike Feldstein: 13:25

I do not like air purifier in the HVAC. Your HVAC system wasn't designed for that. So when you go and add another filter it creates a pressure drop which now decreases your efficiency. It makes your system work way harder. It can't get the hot and the cold where it needs to go and the filter is not even working when the furnace fan is not running. So there's a lot of things. So I like for filtering the air something similar to your solution where you have a distributed system of portable air cleaners in the rooms that you need the most, is the best way to approach the situation.

George Siegal: 14:01

Yeah, I would never want to tie into the air conditioning. I mean, what I found in almost every house I've ever bought is, first of all, the builder doesn't put enough return. Airs in Rooms aren't balanced right. You know, whatever engineer study they do, it's a mystery to me. So I wouldn't want to put that faith in people that I don't have much faith in to begin with. So I like the idea of having individual units, but do those really do enough that they make a difference, or are they more like? I have one in all the rooms we spend the most time in, but are they doing anything?

Mike Feldstein: 14:31

So that's a fun question and, honestly, if there was ever a piece of feedback I got at Jasper that spoke, the highest of our product was. I've owned a lot of air purifiers before but I wasn't really sure if they were doing anything and so this. But with Jasper it was obvious that they were doing stuff. So the chances are they are doing stuff. Like most air purifiers use a pretty good filter.

Mike Feldstein: 14:56

So one unit to another, the filters don't vary that much. Where they do vary is the quality of the sensor to detect the pollen, the wildfire, smoke, cooking products, cleaning products. That's a big deal. The other thing that's a big deal is the size. So if you think about gears in a car, when you're in first gear you could have really high RPMs but you're not actually, you know, moving much. In fifth or sixth gear the RPMs are lower and the car is going a lot faster. So if anyone's ever seen those big ass fans in airports or in industrial settings, they look like they're moving so slow but they're moving so much air. So what is important typically in portable air purifiers is a large fan and a large motor, because a large fan means it can be quiet and still move a lot of air, but generally they are doing a lot. If somebody has dust accumulating in their home, that's not normal. This is, we've normalized it. But if you go outside, there's no dust on your driveway, there's no dust on the sidewalk.

George Siegal: 16:01

So then, why does that happen? I've got to ask you about that because we get a lot of dust in our house constantly. We run our Roomba every day and it's filled with dog hair and dust these filters that we have around the house. We constantly have to clean the dust out of them. So what is that?

Mike Feldstein: 16:17

Well, dust is an accumulation of many, many things, and it's not always the dust itself that's the problem, but it's all the things that can hitch a ride on the dust, like the mold particles, the pollen particles, dust mites, the bacteria, the viruses. So dust is an accumulation of dead skin cells and pet hair. When you look under, not all dust is necessarily equal. It could be a construction debris, it could be a lot of stuff. Now you shouldn't have any. Usually you'll have dust if there's a combination and pets are obviously large contributors. So if you have non-optimal ventilation and air filtration, a bunch of things that people can do to handle it. Number one is a vacuum that has a HEPA filter, because a lot of vacuums they suck up the large particles but then they're just exhausting all the smart particles because the filter is not able to capture all of those particulate. So that's kind of a big piece. The other thing there is the ventilation for sure, like that's why you don't have dust outside, because we have adequate airflow, we have wind, we have UV.

Mike Feldstein: 17:23

The world's best air purifier is nature, but we unfortunately left that outside and so if the air purification is adequate, like typically surface cleaning, it's not gonna reduce the dust. Most people don't ever steam clean their carpets or their furniture. They don't clean the ducks in their home and then, like, the air filtration is often not adequate for the amount of dust in the home. So I became a big believer of air purifiers when I lived in a really dusty condo in Toronto in 2014. And I was waking up with puffy eyes and a sore throat and it was Toronto's just a crazy construction boom. There was condos going up all around us and I put a few air purifiers in our place Small condos like 850 square feet. So the benefit to a small place is the ability to control the environment. So in that smaller environment, once we had adequate air filtration, we had no more dust.

George Siegal: 18:22

Wow, yeah, that's controlling that air is a big thing. I mean we even get on the vents. You see dust on the intakes where it gets up there. So that's a constant battle, especially when you live in a climate like we do, where your windows aren't open except maybe a month or two out of the year because you have your air conditioning blasting all the time.

Mike Feldstein: 18:42

Remind me, you told me right before we hit record where you were in the water.

George Siegal: 18:45

Tampa Florida, tampa Florida.

Mike Feldstein: 18:47

Quite hot most of the time, Quite humid a lot of the time. So if that HVAC system is not doing its job and it's not conditioning the place, that's when mold can become an issue. Mold wouldn't really be contributing to dust necessarily. Also, you typically do actually get dust in a drier climate. I'd be curious what the relative humidity is in your home, because dryness also absolutely contributes to dust for a lot of reasons. One of them is also your skin gets all flaky, your hair can get all flaky, so a lot more dead skin cells are just floating around in a dry environment.

George Siegal: 19:28

Okay, so let's try to come up with some good takeaways here, then for people action items that they can take to determine what they should be doing about the air quality in their house. What do you say?

Mike Feldstein: 19:41

All right. So it depends on if you're a tenant, for example, then obviously a lot of those. I do think getting a reasonable air sensor is a decent idea. I personally I use the aware element, awir element. Don't find the support at the company all that good, but the product works really good. So whatever it's the best sensor that I found, I think if there was, and I think people need to focus on sort of what we can control.

Mike Feldstein: 20:14

If we spend our whole lives worrying about all the things that are killing us, it kind of sucks a lot of the fun out of living. So I like to focus on reasonable, practical solutions. Number one I like to focus on the big things are gonna be cooking stuff, so I'll go touch on that in a second. And where you sleep, and now that we work from home, or even if we don't, if someone's an office worker where you work is probably also really high, because having a whole home filtration system is awesome but table stakes is dialing in your bedroom and if you think about it now, someone who, if someone sleeps with really clean air in their bedroom and then you remove that air purifier, they have panic attacks. They cannot sleep without it. It's kind of like.

Mike Feldstein: 21:03

I don't know when filtered water became so common, but growing up it was kind of just always tap water and then I never really realized how tap water tasted all emigrely until I started drinking filtered water and now tap water, especially at a lot of restaurants. It tastes awful. So we use our sense of taste in this regard to identify potential risks and dangers. We also know through education, like pool water probably not good, ocean water not drinkable, pond water not good, even though the pond water like I could get a couple of water in the pool it looks clean. What do you mean? It's not clean. It's like not clean at all. That water is filled with chemicals and all kinds of stuff. It's just designed to not make you sick when you swim in it today. But so our like societally we have a certain amount of water education that the air is lagging on.

Mike Feldstein: 21:56

So when you sleep in a bedroom at night, our bodies are so good at detecting temperature, for whatever reason, that's like our. If this was like Maslow's hierarchy, temperature, like just oxygen to breathe, is probably level one and temperature is probably level two. So if it's too hot or too cold, you're gonna be very uncomfortable at night. Most people like to sleep a little bit cooler. But temperature is gonna be number one.

Mike Feldstein: 22:21

And let's say you get the temperature really dialed in but the pillow and the bed is so uncomfortable you're still not gonna have a good sleep. If you have a great bed and good temperature but you're on the second floor above a night club that's bumping the base every night, that noise, pollution and that vibration, you're still not gonna have a good sleep. So when you think about like dialing in your sleep sanctuary, it's really like the weakest link is gonna ruin your sleep. It needs to all be pretty good to have a quality sleep and you can't have a good day if you don't have a good night.

Mike Feldstein: 22:51

So I think like and people already kind of know like invest in a good bed for comfort. So it's like if you're gonna invest in a good bed and you're gonna run your air conditioner through the night and you're gonna wash your sheets every week or two or every few days or whatever your hygiene protocol is, you're cleaning that stuff cause you don't wanna sleep in a dirty environment. But we haven't, society, yet realized what we're breathing. So I think one of the cool things now is especially city folks, especially those who have had young children have discovered white noise and I'm like why have a speaker create white noise when you can have an air cleaning machine and a fan? Create the white noise for you.

Mike Feldstein: 23:30

So to me, table stakes is a good air purifier in your bedroom One, and when I created Jasper, I honestly there was times when I wasn't even gonna launch the product. I just created the air purifier I really personally wanted for myself that could handle toxic wildfire smoke, that could have no ambient light when I sleep and could either operate silently or with white noise. That was sort of my table stakes. So you want to have a pretty large air purifier in your room where you're getting at least five or six air changes per hour. Because if you have a really small, cheap air purifier, the problem is you're likely gonna have if you run it. You're gonna need to run it on full speed to be effective. If you run it on full speed it's gonna be loud and annoying. It's not a nice white noise sound on most of the units and it's gonna have these bright lights and then it might have a little button that says sleep. However, when you push that sleep button, you turn the fan speed, it turns the light off and it turns the fan speed to 5%. So I like to joke that the only thing that you put to sleep was the air purifier. You bought this thing to operate in your bedroom at night when you spend time there and it doesn't work.

Mike Feldstein: 24:44

So I think someone dialing in their humidity, their temperature and their CO2. So if somebody puts an air sensor in their room? Another reason why I don't believe in most air testing is the air inspector comes by your house at two or three o'clock, waves the magic wand and leaves, but your air at 2PM is not the same as your air at 2AM. So I believe in capturing the air on a few days or even up to a week to see the different spikes. It's not static at all. So is that what that air sensor?

George Siegal: 25:14

does? Is that what the aware element does?

Mike Feldstein: 25:19

Yeah, yeah.

George Siegal: 25:21

It monitors on a. Are those expensive?

Mike Feldstein: 25:24

200-ish Like affordable, but they do a good job, like here's a snapshot from my daughter's room, so that's like live results. But then the really cool stuff is the trends. So I'll pull up like a weekly trend so we can see every night when she's sleeping the CO2 spikes when she's breathing in there. So her not too high, but generally her CO2 actually is hitting about 1400 lately and that's because it's been very temperate here and the HVAC system hasn't been working very much at night. So CO2 is a big one.

Mike Feldstein: 26:04

A secret tip that I discovered the hard way I was sleeping 10 hours a night, waking up exhausted. In British Columbia a couple years ago Our CO2 was going from 700 to 3000 at night. Over 1000 is when you're starting to have some brain fog, some fatigue, lack of focus. All we had to do was leave the on suite door open and the bathroom fan on all night Because we don't mind white noise and the air purifier is running. That was a solution that kept CO2 under 900. So we didn't have to do any major investments, but we did have to leave the bathroom fan on so there would be enough ventilation and fresh air to control our sleep environment.

George Siegal: 26:43

So do you have to have a different sensor for each room, or can you just move it around?

Mike Feldstein: 26:47

Well, generally once you so you can have a bunch. You could, but if we're kind of also balancing budget stuff here, it's not necessary, because if you put one in your bedroom, you sleep there for a few days, figure out if this is a problem or not, and now you know if someone's tracking Fitbits and Woops and Oryrings like you're using data to see what's going on in your body. People are paying $40, $50 a month for these subscriptions. Like to pay a fraction of that to figure out what's going on in your home. It just seems like a natural progression to me.

Mike Feldstein: 27:19

Seems like a no-brainer and especially, I seen someone go from a 61 sleep score was average sleep score up to a 91 when they put an air purifier in their bedroom and it's not that the air purifier is this magic machine, but it can be because they had elevated mold spores. They didn't have like visible physical black mold, but the mold load, the mold there was Aspergillus Penicillin. The general mold load in their house was high. So by putting an air purifier in their bedroom now they weren't breathing any more mold and now that you're not breathing any more mold they were able to sleep a lot more comfortably at night because their body was able to rest and recover instead of fighting off mold.

Mike Feldstein: 27:59

The average bedroom that I've tested for total particulate it's a hard to explain in layman's terms but basically between 0.3 microns very tiny and 10 microns kind of big, there's typically about 800,000 particles in a bedroom. If you put a good size air purifier in a bedroom within half an hour you're typically in that 800,000 down to about 40,000 or 20,000. So a 95% plus reduction of things that you're breathing at night, which just lets your body recover so much easier. And people with bad allergies find that when they have less allergens in their bedroom at night, when they go outside, their body is a lot more prepared to handle outdoor allergens because they've reduced their indoor allergens.

George Siegal: 28:50

Would you leave those running all the time, or would you just run them at night when you're sleeping?

Mike Feldstein: 28:54

All the time for sure, because that's when you're going to get that dust accumulation Right, like you need to be. When people go on vacation, I tell them to turn it up, because the noise is no concern. It's pennies a day. These things don't take much energy at all.

George Siegal: 29:10

Even if they run all the time and they don't have a, they don't rest or they have that sensor, but if I, there's no off switch, so it's okay to leave it running all the time.

Mike Feldstein: 29:19

All the time.

George Siegal: 29:21

And would you vacuum the filter when it gets dirty or would you buy a new one, because they get dusty really quick?

Mike Feldstein: 29:26

They shouldn't so like. For example, there's a product called the Air Doctor and their big marketing campaign is they get all the influencers to hold up the filter, showing how filthy it is within 30 days. This is the bug, it's not a feature. That is because the filter density and the pleats are very small, so it gets clogged up very quickly. So, for example, a lot of filters weigh 0.3, 0.4 pounds, like Jasper's filter weighs about 4.5 pounds, so it's 10, 11 times the weight. The mass surface area is 3 to 5 times larger as well, so it's not clogging up very quickly.

Mike Feldstein: 30:02

I do not like vacuuming filters. What I learned, like our filter has like a metal cage, like a metal mesh surrounding the filter to protect the rigidity and the structural integrity. Because what was happening is when we were developing our filter and we would send our filter to the lab to get tested, often the filter was performing horribly and we're like what is going on here and what happens is in shipping and handling the filter can be damaged, not visible to the human eye, but just touching. Vacuuming your filter destroys the pleats and the HEPA because you just vacuum off all the dust. You know you clean the filter, but you have this very sensitive paper material. When you vacuum it, you're hurting it badly. You're pulling apart the fibers in the filter. So when you do that, the pores get larger. And now, if you test the filter after vacuuming it, it's going to perform terribly.

George Siegal: 30:56

Yeah, but if you had to replace it every time it got dusty since I told you we have a dust problem, that could get really expensive getting a 30 or 40 dollars filter Every six months every six months. But you just, in the meantime, you would just let the dust build up on it.

Mike Feldstein: 31:10

There's actually a period where there's a curve of efficiency and efficacy, efficiency being per pass how much does this filter capture, and for the efficacy it's how much air flow passes through the filter. So the interesting thing is, as it gets a little bit dirtier it actually performs better because the pores in the filter are now blocked up, so there's less room for particles to pass through the filter. So there's actually a point like day one is not the most efficient day of the filter. It can often be between like month one or month two where the filter performs at its best. Then it kind of levels off and then the diminishing returns start kicking in.

George Siegal: 31:54

And I got to stop vacuuming those things. Well, listen, we're out of time. Is there anything you want to plug before we're done?

Mike Feldstein: 32:01

Is there anything I want to plug? Yeah, our air purifier is pretty awesome.

George Siegal: 32:04

Plug away.

Mike Feldstein: 32:06

And it is expensive. It's $1,400. We occasionally discount it down to $999 or $1099. The filters are $199 twice a year. So it's a $400 annual investment that does include a lifetime warranty. So is it expensive? Yes, but like so is going to doctors, so is not sleeping good at night. So I'm a when you break it down to a typically about a dollar a day over the course of several years to breathe 90% filtered clean air, where I used to think it was really expensive, now I look at it as the laziest way to be healthy and considering what one spends on a massage could be $2,300, water filtration et cetera, I actually think getting less air filters but higher quality air filters is often a good choice for people.

George Siegal: 32:55

Well, if you don't, feel better.

Mike Feldstein: 32:57

If you don't feel better, return it. So we have a 60 day no, no questions asked return policy. If someone's not sleeping way better, they're not seeing the kitchen particles. If you don't this like, forget data lab studies. If one doesn't feel way better and it's not obvious that their experience is a no brainer, then get all your money back. I'm happy to say, in 3000 units sold, we've only had four returns and a couple of those were people who bought them during wildfire events where the the smoke came and went and they're like, honestly, I can't afford this. They didn't even take it out of their box. So I think it's worth it If somebody, actually if someone feels no benefit. It costs too much money, but if they sleep better, if they're, if there are no stops running, if the asthma attacks stop occurring, if the allergies stop happening, then I think it's a great investment.

George Siegal: 33:46

All right. Well, hey, great advice, good information. I'll link in the show notes so people can find you and appreciate your time, mike. Thank you so much.

Mike Feldstein: 33:55

I'll set up code George. What's a good coach for your folks? Should we do a George 200 at the name of the podcast?

George Siegal: 34:02

Do homeowners be aware?

Mike Feldstein: 34:05

All right. I'll send you an email, so I spell out Greg with. Have a great day Shout out to you man.

George Siegal: 34:12

Make sure you check out Mike's contact information in the show notes and if you have any stories about your experiences as a homeowner good or bad I would love to hear about them. There's a contact form in the show notes. Fill it out, you might end up being a guest on an upcoming episode. Thanks again for listening today. See you next time.