Smoking Room

[Matt R]

It'll be hard to keep the smell throughout the house if you smoke constantly or have a bunch of people over. But, if you have one or two smokes a week it should not be impossible. First of all you need a good air cleaner, like the ones at Sharper Image. They aren't cheap, but work well. Needs to run all the time, not just when you're smoking. A more expensive alternative to to get a different air filter put on on your furnace. They have several different kinds that filter smoke odor, along with allergens and other air "polutants" real well. I've got a good frined who smokes constantly and you can't tell if you go into his house and all he has is the Second Wind unit on his furnace. Also a "fart" fan, like the kind you would put in your bathroom, could be installed and vented outside. They make some new units that are pretty quiet. The ones I put in the house actually mount in the attic space and if you're not listening for them, you wouldn't even know we had 'em on. The bigger the better. The more air you're pulling through it the faster it'll vent out. But, a combination of vent fan and air cleaner doesn't always work well together as the air is pulled away from the air cleaner and into the fan. So, you could turn the fan on while you are smoking and then let the air cleaner "clean up" the odor left behind when you are done.
The smoker's candles help, as do other scented candles. Burn them when you are smoking and they will cut down on the smell.
As far as the smell in the carpets, or on the walls, a lot of that will depend on how much you smoke in the room and the quality of the air filter system. But, Febreeze works very well to take out odors in fabrics and the walls. Also a couple things I learned along the way include placing a few bowls of vinegar around the room. Vinegar absorbs odors, as does baking soda.
What it really comes down to is how often and how much you smoke in the room and the ferquency you clean the room. Also, the other furnishings in the room. No matter what, if you have someone who dislikes the odor of smoke, they are always going to smell it and be bothered by it. I write all this, but gotta admit, I don't smoke in my house even though I have all the things mentioned. I have kids and prefer they not be put into the situation of having to breath in my pollutants. For taht matter, I rarely smoke around them even when we are someplace that they would not really be exposed to the smoke.

 

[vewyphishy]

Good man, you are.

You make good points... again, its something to consider. I'll have to weigh my options. Put my good ole economics degree to some use. Maybe draw some graphs.

(that's an old eco adage)

Seriously, it just comes down to cost vs. return. Personally, I don't smoke enough to warrant spending hundreds of dollars to mask the smell that would probably have enough time to dissipate on its own. Then again, its the convenience factor that I'm after. I'm going try some solutions mentioned here on this board... and give it a go for a few days. If the problems persist, then I'll just move the smoking back outside... febreeze the daylights out of the room. No harm, no foul. Back to square 1.

Thanks for all the advice guys! Teh besto! :thumbs:

 

[Matt R]

A good air cleaner will be sufficient if you are going to only be in there on a somewhat infrequent basis. Get one of the good ionic breeze ones.

 

[hyper1]

My opinion or cost vs. return as it relates to smoking coog cigars:

ROI (Return on Investment) = Benefit - Cost

Benefit = Infinite pleasure !!!!!!

ROI = Infinity - x

Substitute any value for x, you still have infinity.


- Mike

 

[vewyphishy]

Matt, what's a good one for the ionic breeze?

Hyper, funny stuff. I like your math.

 

[hyper1]

See earlier in the thread. The Ionic breeze is junk. Consumer reports rated them horribly in a recent review. If anyone wants a copy of the article, PM me and I'll login to Consumer's and send you the article.

 

[Matt R]

Actually I didn't mean the actual brand ionic breeze. I guess what I meant was an ionic type air cleaner. But, that being said, consumer reports or not, I know a couple folks who have the top end Ionic Breeze from Sharper Image and they love them. Both are asthma sufferers and have been using them to help control allergens more than smoke odor though.

 

[hyper1]

Just letting you know. They might like them. I have always lived by Consumers. They specifically rated the Sharper Image one as Horrible. There are much better solutions available for your money. Here's an excerpt. I hope I don't get in trouble for posting this...

The most effective type of air cleaner is a professionally installed whole-house system; but it’s also expensive and feasible only in houses with forced-air heating or cooling. Simple replacement furnace filters are inexpensive and easy to maintain, but generally better suited to clearing large particles from the air.

Room air cleaners are your only option if you don’t have a forced-air system. The top three can quickly clear smoke and dust from a room; the worst is little better than nothing at all. One, the Blueair (27), set a new standard of excellence in our tests at its high speed, but performed poorly on low.

With most room air cleaners, the cost of electricity and replacement filters can be substantial. Choose a room-sized air cleaner that’s designed to cover an area slightly larger than the one you need to treat. That way, you may be able to run it on low and still get adequate cleaning.

The Ratings of whole-house and room air cleaners rank models by performance. The Quick Picks, below, consider other factors, such as operating costs.




QUICK PICKS
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A professionally installed whole-house cleaner:

1 Aprilaire $600
4 Trane $600
5 Honeywell $600
These three combine excellent overall performance with a moderate price and operating cost. The Trane (3) imposes the smallest restriction on airflow.



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An install-it-yourself whole-house filter:

8 3M $15
Although the most expensive of its type, with an annual upkeep of $60, this electrostatic pleated filter is the standout of its type for dust removal.


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Room air cleaners that are very effective with moderate operating costs:

19 Friedrich $500
21 Whirlpool $270
The Friedrich (19), an electrostatic precipitator, was among the best at removing dust and smoke. We found that its $72 auxiliary odor filter adds nothing to performance and may not need to be replaced annually. However, its collector plates do need periodic cleaning, and it may generate ozone and make a crackling noise. The Whirlpool (21), a HEPA filter, has fairly low upkeep costs for this type.

Last year, we said that the Ionic Breeze “proved unimpressive” and that our tests “found almost no measurable reduction in airborne particles.”

The company complained, maintaining that our tests, based on the industry standard for measuring clean-air delivery rate (CADR), were inadequate. Sharper Image said that the Ionic Breeze technology is “vastly different” from that of other air cleaners and would fare better in a longer test.

We re-examined our test procedures and had them reviewed by an independent expert, Morton Lippmann, professor of environmental medicine at New York University. He confirmed the validity of our methodology. We continue to stand behind our report.

This year, we ran our regular tests for the Ratings of whole-house and room air cleaners. We then ran additional long-term tests to find out whether the Sharper Image technology is, as the company says, “so unique” that we have to “look beyond the limiting CADR test protocol” to evaluate it fairly. We included the similar Honeywell Environizer in the extended testing.

This year’s additional testing has not changed our judgment.

We hired both Prof. Lippmann and S. Katharine Hammond, professor of environmental health sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, to evaluate the results of several studies that Sharper Image sent us to demonstrate the Ionic Breeze’s effectiveness. According to our two experts, some of those studies were irrelevant to the question of whether the Ionic Breeze was an effective air cleaner. For example, one Virginia study used the Ionic Breeze only as a particle sampler, not an air cleaner. Other studies used questionable methodology or showed merely that the Sharper Image had little air-cleaning capability.


THIS YEAR'S ADDED TESTS AND RESULTS

Long-term air cleaning. We tested the Sharper Image Ionic Breeze and the Honeywell Environizer against two high-scoring air cleaners, the Friedrich electrostatic precipitator and the Whirlpool HEPA filter.

We gauged how well each air cleaner could handle the periodic introduction of small amounts of pollutant into a sealed test chamber over a 6-hour period. One set of tests used smoke, another fine dust. A second set of tests gauged how well each cleaner worked for the next 17 hours, after the last injection of pollutant. For both sets of tests, we ran the Ionic Breeze and the Environizer on high to maximize performance; the others were on low, their quietest setting.

The better an air cleaner does in lab tests like these, the better it will perform in a household setting. But as Prof. Lippmann explained, if there is “very little dust removal over 100 minutes,” then running an air cleaner for 24 hours “is not going to make it an effective air cleaner when infiltration of air containing particles into a room continues.”

The results. The Ionic Breeze and the Environizer didn’t come close to the performance of the others. As the graph below shows, the Friedrich and Whirlpool have very high rates of air-cleaning. The Ionic Breeze and Environizer had very slow rates of cleaning, which did not improve over time; those two products never achieved the same low pollutant level that the Friedrich and Whirlpool attained.

Noise study. We asked 40 people in 20 households to run the Friedrich and Whirlpool in their bedrooms continuously on low speed for a week.

The results. Thirty-five of those using the Friedrich said they didn’t notice the noise, hardly noticed it, or noticed but didn’t find it bothersome. With the Whirlpool, 29 people didn’t notice the noise at all, hardly noticed it, or noticed but didn’t find it bothersome. Two said the Whirlpool’s noise was so annoying that they wanted to turn the machine off. No one said that about the Friedrich.

Given those findings, you could expect most of the air cleaners we tested to be quiet enough on low speed for most households. Based on our lab measurements and judgments, both fell within the range we call very good for noise on low speed.


THE BOTTOM LINE

The Ionic Breeze and the Environizer are quiet but ineffective. A comparable product, the Hoover SilentAir 4000, performed poorly in our standard test; we chose not to put it through any extended trials. Considering how slowly these three products worked, our advice is to avoid all three. There are much better choices.

 

[Matt R]

I tend to believe in CR's testing also. So, wouldn't disagree with them in general and having read that article would tend to shy people away from them. That being said, maybe it's just luck, but one of the friends I have who uses one of the SI I.B.s, had regular asthma attacks before they bought the unit and has had a huge decrease in attacks, to the point that she has not had to visit the doctor except for her regular check ups. So, either it works for her specific symptoms or she outgrew the asthma.

For the record, I have the Aprilaire system, along with an Aprilaire humidifier, attached to my furnace.