Typing this now as the desk lamp shines through haze.
I have a high-throughput home air purifier (specs, the RabbitAir 780A), and when the air in the living room (off a small kitchen with a small window) gets soupy I open all the windows and turn the AC to Fan at max.
I’m thinking that yes, this adds (and circulates out) fresh air, but it gives the purifier a bigger mass, even with lower concentration of pollutant, to work with, and wonder if directly sucking out (recirculating) through the purifier the unadulterated smog is in some ways more efficient, over some time scale (that may be objectionable subjectively, of course).
I do a lot of stove top searing, which creates tons of smoke. I’ve started keeping a window fan handy in our kitchen closet. When I sear, I put the fan in the window nearest the stove and blow the smoke right outside. Works great.
(Underline mine) No, in your scenario the purifier has less mass (pollutant) to contend with. The air mass moving through the purifier is the same regardless of window position, so if you cut the smoke concentration by opening windows, you increase the efficiency of your purifier by decreasing the overall concentration of pollutants fed to it.
Depending on the size of your house, I’d turn the AC (I’m assuming this is a central system) off. All that’s doing is moving the smoke and grease around to other parts of the house and getting as well as getting it inside the ductwork and filter.
If your air purifier works well enough to do anything, that’s great, but in any case, open windows. My suggestion is to open two windows, at opposite ends of the room (or house, if it’s feasible) and put a fan blowing out in one of them. That would be the most efficient way to bring in clean, fresh air. However, if it’s cold or hot out (moreso if it’s cold) your house may take a while to recover from the temp change so this may not be optimal.
Something to note, in summer, sometimes I’ll wait until the sun goes down and and it cools off and use the two window/fan method. I have a box fan that I can close a window around. I put the fan, blowing out, in back bedroom so I don’t have to listen to it. I wouldn’t do that in this situation because that would draw the smoke through the entire house.
TL;DR, yes, open a window. Your air purifier can’t possibly compete with exchanging fresh air from outside.
A lot depends upon what “opening all the windows” means. And what kind of filter the furnace uses.
Presumably, by setting the A/C fan going, you are also sucking some of the dirty air into the intake. If the furnace filter is just a standard one though, this may accomplish very little except to disperse the smoke into rooms the purifier can’t draw from. If you have a HEPA furnace filter, then turning on that fan is helpful.
Likewise, opening the windows will certainly result in some amount of smoke exiting the home. Do you have windows on more than one side? A full cross draft? If so, then definitely open them. If not, you may be losing a lot of preferred temperature for a small drop in pollution, and again, moving the pollution into rooms the purifier doesn’t service.
The optimal choice, as kayaker said, is fan near the smoke source sucking air out of the home. Then the purifier working between the source and the rest of the home. If the cross draft is blowing the pollution into the rest of the home, that’s not helping you. If the HVAC is pulling the smoke into the rest of the home, that’s not helping you.
If you have a kitchen window, get an exhaust fan for it. That’s your most efficient move.
Hello friends. More smoky apartment, different questions.
Just a reminder of the experimental apparatus: single a/c in single living room window (ie not central). No fan in kitchen with open doorway. Same air purifier as in OP.
New question, puzzlement: what is working/not working to move air when I turni on the a/c itself, ie, the the cooling/compressor. I always thought the exhaust fan was independent, as to airflow was it its max–ie with equivalent effect as to air transfer–whether the thing was set on “exhaust only.” I used the a/c setting with open windows, at the risk of committing a capital “do you need to cool the whole town” crime, because its been so damn hot.
Three points:
This is on the main panel with the choice of a/c-or- exhaust-only So question 1: Is it just my imagination, or is the air transfer, disregarding temperature, different depending on the setting? Because the a/c setting rocked.
In addition, as long as you’re all here, let’s add to that the sliding-bar range of settings under the louvres, marked at one extreme “fresh air” and the other “exhaust only.” What gives with that, especially in light of the fine tuning of OP? As for setting it for “maximum cooling,” I was told to keep the setting midway, which I always dutifully followed, I’vI don’t think is the right idea when its 100ᵒ out.
In any event, any implementation or experimentation with that setting that variable is moot because its jammed to “exhaust”–which I would always do anyway when the house was smoky and I had the “real” choice set not to a/c but to Exhaust. So that was and is probably of no matter anyway, although I would like to k now.
I think this would be a lot more helpful with the make/model. What those things generally mean my not be the same for yours.
In fact, the manual is probably online somewhere that would explain exactly what all the settings do and how they do or do not interact with or override each other.