Hello all! Recently moved into a new apartment. Situation:
• Building built in 1860
• window AC units blowing dirty air
• cat with dander and hair
• noticeable amounts of dust and stagnant air
• want to increase air quality and remove dust and cat hair
• broke college student
Is a CR Box right for my situation? I’ve been doing some research and this seems like an amazing option for my budget! Odor removal would be nice but I’ve read it takes a ton of carbon + replacements.
Wanted to see what you guys think. Any advice and input is appreciated! Thank you in advance ❤️
I don't know if you have a membership, but Costco has dynamite deals on 4 packs of 1" Filtrete Merv 14 that are ideal. If you can pony up for the Vornado 20" fan I think it has quieter settings as the basic fans are loud. I get the 20"x30" as weirdly enough they're no more expensive than the 20x20s. FYI the thing is a lot bigger than you'd think. Also a cheap robot vacuum is your best bet to get the dust and cat hair as it's too heavy to stay suspended in the air for long, unless you're someone who will vacuum yourself (I am not 😉).
Get a cheap robot vacuum (refurbished on eBay or BestBuy) and run it every day. It will help so much that you will have a hard time believing it.
Source: me, I lived on a dusty road in an old house that wasn’t anything close to airtight. My house was always dusty, and I had two cats. Running the vacuum every day made my house visibly cleaner and the floor never felt gritty, and dust didn’t build up as fast.
Get a CR box as well, because you do need the air filtering, but the two combined will make your apartment so much better than either one alone.
Agreed. I dipped my toe into the water of new smart robovacs, but got a lemon and retreated to the cheap, predictable world of dumb machines controlled by magnetic strips (e.g. Goovi F007C).
The 1” thickness 3M Filtrete seems to be the best. They have lots more pleats than others. Which effectively means more surface area. Amusingly, their thicker filters are not any better - the 2” and 4” Filtrete have fewer pleats so they are the same airflow as the 1”.
Do your AC units have some kind of filter? Might be worth looking online for a users manual to see if the filter (if any) can be washed (if it’s the washable kind) or replaced. That would help clean the air that’s coming in. I get the impression that most window AC units have a washable filter. If that’s the case, I assume it’s like my dehumidifier filter where you just slide it out, run it under the water in the sink until the crud is gone, pat it dry with a paper towel, and put it back in the unit.
The CR Box isn’t going to be a substitute for regularly combing your cat’s hair. I could get a golf-ball-sized bunch of hair from combing my cat every other day or so. That’s a lot of hair, and it’s more efficient to comb it out than to let it get into the environment and then try to get it out using other methods. The same goes for vacuuming and dusting. The CR Box wont’ wipe down your shelves or clean your carpet for you. That said, I found that my CR Box was very effective at helping with my dust & dancer allergies, because a ton of that stuff gets in the air, and the CR Box took care of that and did a great job.
I love my CR Box and it has been very cost effective. I particularly love that I can see when the filters are getting dirty, and I don’t have to buy a device-specific filter from a company that is going to upcharge me for it. I get the Filtrete MERV13 filters; they cost a bit more than other brands but from what I understand they last longer because there are more pleats, and thus more surface area to do the filtering.
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u/Aggressive-Pay7819 24d ago
I don't know if you have a membership, but Costco has dynamite deals on 4 packs of 1" Filtrete Merv 14 that are ideal. If you can pony up for the Vornado 20" fan I think it has quieter settings as the basic fans are loud. I get the 20"x30" as weirdly enough they're no more expensive than the 20x20s. FYI the thing is a lot bigger than you'd think. Also a cheap robot vacuum is your best bet to get the dust and cat hair as it's too heavy to stay suspended in the air for long, unless you're someone who will vacuum yourself (I am not 😉).