Having said that, the obvious exception is when cigarette, pipe or cigar smoking occurs on a regular basis. Now the pollution can’t be missed, you can see it and you can smell it. The health concerns regarding smoking are well known and possibly beaten to death, so we won’t get in to that. Not so obvious is the health impact of dirty interior air when we don’t notice it. Medical experts have concluded that symptoms ranging from headaches, asthma, bronchitis, allergies and cancer among others, may likely be attributed to polluted interior air.

The next reason to use a furnace filter or air conditioning filter is to keep your heating and cooling system operating as it was designed and to prolong its life. For an air conditioning unit to operate at its peak efficiency it needs to be kept clean. The evaporator is the component in your system in which the air passes directly over and is cooled and returned to your living space. The surfaces of the evaporator are normally very cold and therefore wet with condensation. The moisture in the air condensates on the evaporator and subsequently drains to the exterior of the building. Imagine blowing dirty air across the cold wet surfaces of the evaporator. How long do you think it takes for the dirt to completely cover this wet surface? Once dirty, the evaporator loses efficiency and may begin to support mold and bacteria growth, after all it is a dark moist environment.

The last reason for using an air conditioning filter and furnace filter is to help keep your house clean. Look at it this way, every time your air conditioner or furnace runs it is like someone is vacuuming the air of dust, dirt or worse. All of this for only a couple bucks per month, seems like an obvious choice, your air must be filtered. What may not be obvious is which furnace filter and air conditioning filters should be used, we will try to help with that decision.

The average person takes about 20 breaths per minute, which works out to almost 30,000 breaths per day. Clearly this is an activity which we spend considerable time, if not effort. Each one of those breaths contain dust, bacteria, germs, soot, fumes, pollen and many other harmful material. It is true that our bodies have some built in filtration functions but why overtax the body? Estimates vary widely but some suggest interior air can be 10 or more times as polluted as outside air. If the man made indoor pollution is that concentrated should we really believe our bodies were designed for that? Not likely.

We humans live in closer proximity to each other than ever before. That proximity intensifies the airborne particles from vehicles, other people, animals, manufacturing and other sources. Some well known airborne diseases are influenza, diphtheria, hay fever, tuberculosis, colds, viruses, pneumonia, scarlet fever, measles, etc.

When we think about dust its not just dust it is made up of a vast array of materials. Most of the materials are not good, such as; soot, dander, sand, smoke, fibers, insects, hair, not to mention chemical fumes. The US Weather Service estimates that one cubic inch of air could contain as much as 100,000 particles of dust. Worse yet, each piece of dust can contain thousands of germs.

A human living indoors is a relatively new phenomenon, at least with more or less sealed buildings. Only one hundred years ago our buildings had no air conditioning, central heat, weather-stripping, thermal pane windows, insulation or any of the modern products currently used to effectively seal the inside air from the outside.

Health statistics show that incidence of asthma which is known to be aggravated by air pollution is rising dramatically in the USA. The health risks are too great to ignore the regular use and replacement of a good air conditioning filter