Off Topic ... Surviving heavy smoke
CaptHenway
Posts: 32,356 ✭✭✭✭✭
If the Moderators will indulge me for a few days before deleting this, I would like to offer a few suggestions to our members on the East Coast who are suffering under the heavy smoke from the forest fires in Canada, based upon my own experience with forest fire smoke out here in Colorado.
If you can still find one, get a large air purifier and run it 24/7. We got a Dyson from Best Buy a few years ago, and it really works. If money is no object get one for your bedroom and one for your living room.
Get the highest rating number furnace filter you can find and install it. The cheap ones are numbered around 1080. Try to find a 2500, but if necessary settle for a 1900. Run your furnace fan 24/7. Get a couple just in case this lasts and you need a spare. If the weather changes and the smoke blows out you can take it out a few days later, after the air in your house is clean, and save it for possible future use. We had a whole Summer of this one year.
Close your windows tight as if you were shutting them up for the winter. If necessary use that blue painter's tape on leaky ones.
Wear a mask outdoors.
Good luck.
Comments
Thanks. There's always room here for a public service announcement of this importance.
Worry is the interest you pay on a debt you may not owe.
"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value---zero."----Voltaire
"Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said."----Voltaire
I remember much worse smog back in the 70s. I hope those with sensitive respiratory systems protect themselves.
Absolutely! I'm in Baltimore and in relatively good shape but this smoke has been debilitating. The nights have been cool so I left my windows open the night before last... BIG MISTAKE! I woke up yesterday morning with a scratchy throat and a monster sinus headache. I do have seasonal allergies and take Flonase and an oral decongestant to alleviate symptoms but none of that worked... Last night, I closed all the windows and ran the AC... much better. I also have an air purifier running on the main floor but I'll likely move it up to the bedroom tonight.
Stay safe out there!!
...and here are some coins for good measure...
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Thanks! Yesterday was pretty bad here in Queens. NY. The city DOE has us working remote today.
I wonder if the smoke will make it to Florida where I live.
Worry is the interest you pay on a debt you may not owe.
"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value---zero."----Voltaire
"Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said."----Voltaire
To help keep this "natural disaster" coin related...
If you leave a coin out in this smog and it tones dramatically, does it count for natural toning?
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Getting rain here in the Hudson Valley/Catskills this morning... that will help the air situation... Went out a little while ago... much better, hope the rain lasts a few hours. Cheers, RickO
Funny you should mention that. Watching the news last night about the volcano eruption on Kilauea and the massive amount of sulfur dioxide being released, I thought about toning impact. Luckily not life threatening there.
Live in central NJ and yesterday was horrible, was in yard 15 minutes and had a headache all afternoon and throat was sore and scratchy. Little better this morning but supposed to worsen as day progresses.
Well, it's in the DC metro region this morning, and though it is very mild compared to NYC, I hear it will get worse.
Tom
East coast has rookie AQI numbers compared to Alaska, in which call smoke like this “July”. You’ll all be fine, it will pass as the weather shifts.
Likely not... the weather patterns are shifting here in the Mid-Atlantic region and a cold front is pushing in. Our forecast is for this smokey haze to blow out to the Atlantic ocean by Saturday...
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We have haze in ATL from it. Last night outside I smelled sulfur, not sure if related but it was in the air.
I saw the videos of the Manhattan skyline. Insane!
BHNC #248 … 130 and counting.
We in California can sympathize with you after going through much of last summer with our own wildfires. I live in the San Joaquin Valley, which is like a big bowl in the center of California surrounded by mountains on all sides. Our sky doesn’t look as bad as the photos I’ve seen of New York, but the smell, scratchy and raspy throat are real, certainly nothing you would want to expose your lungs to for an extended period of time.
Here are before and after pics of our sky from last summer. Praying yours disappears faster.
- Bob -
MPL's - Lincolns of Color
Central Valley Roosevelts
Great suggestions. Also don't forget your car. Some cars have air filters that can be replaced or cleaned for the interior air conditioning system. Also not a bad idea to replace the engine's air filter once the smoke with any ash in it subsides. Here in the Northland we have occasional volcanoes that go off and the silicon filled ash from them wreaks havoc on car engines so the first thing we do after a volcano is replace the car's air filter.
I drove down to Syracuse yesterday, and it looked terrible, I could barely breathe. Even back home near Lake Erie it was terrible, I went for a run 2 days ago and could barely complete it.
Not my coin.
Type collector, mainly into Seated. -formerly Ownerofawheatiehorde. Good BST transactions with: mirabela, OKCC, MICHAELDIXON, Gerard
Hack hack I can't see the scream to read this!!!!
+1 to @northcoin about the car filters. Get an in-cabin HEPA air filter for your car, they're not expensive and available on Amazon. A quick Google search will tell you what model number to get for your make/model of car. The stock in-cabin filters are essentially useless when it comes to fire smoke. The HEPA's make a massive difference. When installed it will lower the CFM on your air conditioner so you may need to crank it up to high but your air inside will be clean. Most are located inside your glove compartment and are super easy to swap out. Check YouTube for a video on how to do it for your particular car. I keep one in my car at all times since 2017. Also, super important....keep your AC on recirculate so it keeps re-purifying the inside air instead of pulling new air in from outside. If you have to go out a well fitting N95 mask helps too. It won't filter it all out but it's better than the lame cloth masks. I live in Santa Rosa, pic from my neighborhood during our last fire storm. Smoke sucks.
Somehow CAC will be mentioned in this thread at some point
I'll add to this from my experience... if your thermostat doesn't have a way to just turn on the fan, an HVAC technician can either add the additional wire you need to enable this, or install a switch at the furnace (I did the latter because it was much cheaper based on what they'd need to do to get the wire to the thermostat). It might be too late to get this done right now, but when things settle down or at your system's next inspection, it's pretty cheap ($100-200?) and then you always have it. Even when it's not smokey, I sometimes run this overnight in the summer with the windows open when it's cool out just to bring in fresh air and circulate it through the house.
Does the smoke smell like a campfire or a trash fire?
I remember in 2017, thousands of homes were burning in Santa Rosa on the same morning that a large forest fire started in Geyservile… I live right in between.
At first it smelled like wood smoke, then the wind shifted and we got the smoke from the city on fire… put on our welding respirators for the sketchy drive to Fort Bragg.
Good times 🤯
If you want to work out, head to the gym and have at it. During a bad stretch of fires, I was training for a marathon and logged 2 hours plus on the treadmill. Not fun, but safe.
"Seu cabra da peste,
"Sou Mangueira......."
As soon as I step outside, I smell an acrid scent that vaguely resembles burnt bread and a campfire.
A photo from yesterday.
Type collector, mainly into Seated. -formerly Ownerofawheatiehorde. Good BST transactions with: mirabela, OKCC, MICHAELDIXON, Gerard
So true, for us here in Cali.
I live outside the Toronto area and have been golfing everyday and feel fine.
Maybe the natural immunity I got from overcoming Covid last November made me stronger (I doubt it).
Perhaps Pfizer will have a vaccine on the market soon for smokey skies.
"“Those who sacrifice liberty for security/safety deserve neither.“(Benjamin Franklin)
"I only golf on days that end in 'Y'" (DE59)
If you can find them, you can build a DIY filter that has been scientifically proven to work very very well. I just don't remember the name... Google for Corsi-Rosenthal box
1x Box Fan
4x HEPA air conditioner filters. Size them to the box fan. If it's a 20" fan buy 20x20x1 filters
Duct tape
Put the filters together with tape to make a box, with the directional arrows pointing OUT. Put the box fan on top blowing down.
Poof. In normal times it's a $50-75 filter as good as any commercial one.
You can also do it with just one filter, less effective, but cheaper and maybe easier to source.
https://www.epa.gov/air-research/research-diy-air-cleaners-reduce-wildfire-smoke-indoors
ANA 50 year/Life Member (now "Emeritus")
The news cracks me up. In Idaho, we've had weeks on end of smoky, hazy skies for much of the last several summers. California, Oregon, and Washington stuff always finds its way to us.
A few days of this on the East Coast and it's all anyone in the news can talk about. I feel for y'all, but parts of the country have been dealing with this routinely for much of our lives.
I love a camp fire and all of its safety demands to make it relaxing.
Yesterday though, there was one aspect of this event, that when I had to explain to my little one's to be safe, I described it like this. You know when your sitting near the fire and the wind shifts pushing the smoke into your eyes ? With a camp fire you can always find a space where your eyes can restart so to say. Yesterday the restart button could only be found in some kind of shelter. I hope everything's cool up there now, don't worry about us, were easy.
We get some heavy Western smoke down here. Three years ago we had the second and third worst fires in state history within 50 miles of us AT THE SAME TIME and our AQI barely broke 250. NYC hit 486 the other day. I think they have bragging rights.
Oh I’m not saying they’re not getting absolutely clobbered…. It’s just that we spent about 10 weeks of 2020 without seeing blue sky and there wasn’t one whisper about it on the national news. A couple days of smoke back east and it dominates the news cycle.
I mean it's nothing new right? Events that impact the NY or DC area get more major media news coverage than similar events impacting other areas of the country. It's just how it is and how it's been for at least the past 5 decades that I can recall. If the major national news media outlets were based out of San Francisco and San Diego and the nations capital was Los Angeles the people on the east coast would likely be experiencing the same issue we do here on the west coast.
It's not about bragging rights. It's about where the media is.