At the end of the day...keep calm and carry on lah!

Thankfully the PSI level is now in the more tolerable lower end spectrum of the "unhealthy" range. Earlier with the earth shattering 401 PSI I took to even wearing my mask indoors as it was quite bad. Not only that, I got a free slight fever courtesy of the haze, unfortunately for me, I do not qualify for the SGD10.00 special lelong rate to see a doc.

So keep calm and carry on! Rinse and repeat this tomorrow for sure! It is the weekend after all and Murphy must participate. The rabbit meanwhile has learnt to be really chill. I envy it.

So one thing I noticed that roughly 24 hours after attached the 3M Filtrete paper onto my stand fan, one can see some discolouration which is hauntingly familiar. It looks like those tobacco filter after a smoker is through with it. No $#!T Sherlock, this is not photoshop-ed for effect. The filter paper is really browning. Even the aircon ones I attached are like that too.

As I was wide awake at around 0300hrs this morning, I did some google research on various air purifiers, PM ratings, haze and so on and ended up with some thoughts.

From what I gathered, the best no nonsense approach would be to bascially seal a room properly and whack a true HEPA air purifier to filter the existing air and fresh incoming air into the room. Since I was so irritated by this whole episode and getting a free fever, I gathered up my credit card and ordered from Amazon a Honeywell Long-Life Pure HEPA QuietCare Air Purifier, 17000. I am no way promoting it but just providing information to anyone interested. This is a US unit that is 120Vac so you got to whack a step down transformer before using! It is due to arrive sometime in July. Yeah the haze might long be gone or we might get the tail end of it for me to experiment. Small outlay but potential great comfort for me in the long run/future.

As you cannot lug around this 6kg beauty everywhere you go and not to mention it cannot purify the whole office that you work in, a common alternative that people are going for is personal protection equipment like the N95 rated mask. Which is flaky way of doing things as improper seal on the mouth is the easiest way to render this as good as the common toilet paper. Common mistake you see is people using too big ones. I suspect that they were not able to get the right size and just bought whatever they could get their hands on.

Which is why chemical defence people use gas masks and not N95 right (former NSF) boys? N95 was more designed to prevent a user's spread of germs etc than preventing dust inhalation. That is a big difference. But the thing is gas masks look silly sometimes, have poor designs and colours and generally is not easy to put on. Also one has to be pretty clean shaven to ensure a good seal (but is easier to get a good seal than N95). So men who want to maintain that stubble look need not look at gas masks or half face/full face respirators with insanely high ratings.

Moving onto the haze part. Estimate of what particulates constitute a haze says PM10 and below make up the bulk eg 80-90 percent. Some even say PM2.5 make up 80 percent of a haze. If so most of us are well and truly done as most masks will not filter these particulates.

But wait a minute here, why does the usage of a simple 3 ply seem to work? Well here is my uneducated guess. It probably filters the larger than PM10 particulates (the minimum size depends on the material and construction of the mask of course) which NEA does not measure. We do not measure them as EPA guideline setters and other learned and esteemed folks around the world agree in general that the wonderful nastiness lie mostly in PM10 and below sizes.

Mind you though, inhaling bigger particulates will still irritate our respiratory system, go ask your friendly local volcano victim in Pompeii and I am sure he will concur.

So whatever it is, it is probably good to filter what we can by masks to remove what irritants we can but let us not kid ourselves. The actual solution is getting an effective air purifier but even that is sometimes fraught with dubious claims and sometimes even dangerous by products. which is why I am just going for the simple physical media separation method as it is the old school way. Haha.

Now let me go now and cough up my half my lungs. Hopefully I get a good night's sleep. My 3M Filtrete paper filters mainly 5 to 7 microns. Maybe it is just lousy enough to keep my phelgm yellow but also good enough in preventing me from collapsing like a little girl on the floor from the haze.