Smoke !!!

[Larry Frank]

Here in NW Indiana, the smoke from the Canadian fires has gotten bad this last week. At times, it looks like a dense fog and is stinky.

I got out the device I use to measure shop air quality and took it outside this morning and got this unhealthy reading. It was even worse yesterday.

503563

Fortunately, the air quality inside Is much better. There are many people who have breathing difficulties who are having serious trouble.

[Rob Luter]

It’s been bad in South Bend for three days. Burning eyes, sore throat, rough lungs. We had rain this morning and it helped for about an hour.

[Jason Roehl]

I’m just a bit south of you, and it was really bad Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday, the wind shifted, and the air improved somewhat, then we had a strong storm front come through that knocked the air quality index way down to roughly normal levels. I sounded really bad for those two days, having trouble speaking at times. Water helped some during the day, but some strong libation in the evening really lubricated the vocal cords.

[Earl McLain]

I'm about in between Larry & Rob--after yesterday afternoon rain, i was able to see the farm on the other side of the bean field for the first time this week--only about a half mile away. Dense fog this morning, but i THINK it's fog, not smoke!!

[Alan Lightstone]

Since, sadly, this bad air quality is forecast to continue on and off for perhaps the whole summer, I would put serious consideration to buying or making an indoor air filter. There are several very good ones on the market, and I'm a big proponent of building one with four 20x20 MERV13 air filters, and a box fan. Amazingly, works very well. Also, replace your HVAC filters with high MERV13 ones ASAP.

We took the premade unit route a few years ago, as it's a great white noise generator in a way at night, and have one in our bedroom. AQI typically is about 1 overnight. 2-3 in my den.

This approach worked very well for a friend of mine in Reno last year with their terrible forest fires. Outside the air was frightening, but at least indoors his family and young children were safe.

[Rich Engelhardt]

Since I have COPD really bad - - I can't tell the difference between good or bad air.
Oh well...one less thing for me to worry about. :)

[Dave Fritz]

We unplugged our heat exchanger that brings in outside air. Our electric air filter on the furnace couldn't keep up. Indoor air got as high as PM 2.5 of 13. (12 and higher is bad) That's when we pulled the plug. It was almost 200 outside. Once we did the reading when down to 1. On another matter, we have a 92 year old neighbor that doesn't understand why they can't put those fires out. I tried to tell her 8 million acres of forest has burned. Hard to comprehend. A former student of mine is married and lives in New Mexico on a ranch. She posted photo's of them moving cattle to summer pasture up in the mountains. The number of dead pines was astonishing. Lots of potential fuel still available I'm afraid.

Something I've just found that may be of interest - https://www.airnow.gov/airnow-mobile-app/

[Warren Lake]

toronto is the worst in the world right now so they say. Im working there at the moment and the factory is open. Say it will be another bad day today. Traffic around the whole place is insane and they want to bring in 300k more people a year. Glad I moved to the country.

[Bill George]

Since, sadly, this bad air quality is forecast to continue on and off for perhaps the whole summer, I would put serious consideration to buying or making an indoor air filter. There are several very good ones on the market, and I'm a big proponent of building one with four 20x20 MERV13 air filters, and a box fan. Amazingly, works very well. Also, replace your HVAC filters with high MERV13 ones ASAP.

We took the premade unit route a few years ago, as it's a great white noise generator in a way at night, and have one in our bedroom. AQI typically is about 1 overnight. 2-3 in my den.

This approach worked very well for a friend of mine in Reno last year with their terrible forest fires. Outside the air was frightening, but at least indoors his family and young children were safe.

Be very careful of installing MERV 13 filters or even a 11 on older units. The blowers installed on those units can not force enough air thru them for AC or Heating to work correctly. Even my modern ECM fan motor has issues with the 13 when they start to be filled with dust. These motors ramp up the speed to get the proper air flow, older blowers can not do that. The computer controlling those blowers looks for the proper amp draw to equal a given CFM and speeds the motor to equal that.

[Brian Tymchak]

Be very careful of installing MERV 13 filters or even a 11 on older units. The blowers installed on those units can not force enough air thru them for AC or Heating to work correctly. Even my modern ECM fan motor has issues with the 13 when they start to be filled with dust. These motors ramp up the speed to get the proper air flow, older blowers can not do that. The computer controlling those blowers looks for the proper amp draw to equal a given CFM and speeds the motor to equal that.

Yep, I learned that lesson the hard way on our old system. I still need to find a home for some merv 11/13 filters.

[Brian Tymchak]

Here in NW Indiana, the smoke from the Canadian fires has gotten bad this last week. At times, it looks like a dense fog and is stinky.

I got out the device I use to measure shop air quality and took it outside this morning and got this unhealthy reading. It was even worse yesterday.

503563

Fortunately, the air quality inside Is much better. There are many people who have breathing difficulties who are having serious trouble.

We hit 242 briefly here in Columbus a few days ago. Much better today, but I figure this will be a summer-long issue.

[Mike Soaper]

Waiting for someone (not this forum) to suggest putting a bazillion furnace filters in front of wind turbines to filter the smoke.

[Edward Weber]

Sorry many of you are getting to experience wildfire smoke, not something I'd wish on anyone.
Just be safe and use a decent mask/respeirator when necessary, you don't know what's in that smoke.
A few years ago we had AQI over 200, the air was chunky.
This is what the sky looked like for a week or more
503613

[Brian Runau]

It was 220 level in Indy yesterday. Brian

[Lee Schierer]

You can get a map of North America that shows the air quality index for areas all over. https://fire.airnow.gov/

[Scott Winners]

I started with commercial air filtration units, but the replacement prices for filter media sent me to the drawing board.

I agree with Alan a quad of MERV 13 furnace filters and a 20" box fan ( plus some duct tape) should do the trick for most of you. Both of "Corsi-Rosenthal box" and "Comparetto Cube" should provide plentiful internet search engine hits.

Shopping the 3M Filtrete line, both the 1900 and 2200 series filters meet or exceed MERV 13 without spending stupid money. At Team Orange Home Store, you are looking for "level 10."

Good luck and best wishes.

[Ole Anderson]

You can get a map of North America that shows the air quality index for areas all over. https://fire.airnow.gov/

That map is very interesting. You can zoom in or out as much as you want, all the way to all of north America. And you can click on an individual fire which, in many cases, will give you details about the fire and efforts to fight it.

[Edward Weber]

I know this is new to many of you but out here we've had the CAL-Fire website for many years.
https://www.fire.ca.gov/
This is an invaluable tool when things go wrong. along with an AQI map. In my area, I use Spare The Air
https://www.sparetheair.com/

The last few years, many of us started out the day, not by checking the weather like normal folks but checking the AQI then Cal-Fire and only then, if we were actually going to venture outside, the weather.
Stay safe everyone.

[Brian Tymchak]

You can get a map of North America that shows the air quality index for areas all over. https://fire.airnow.gov/

Thanks for that link Lee!

[Patty Hann]

And for fires all over the US.... https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/