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Is it safe to turn it on an AC? If you have an air purifier, where should you put it? An air quality expert answers our pressing questions.
You’re in your apartment, windows closed, hiding out from the wildfire smoke blanketing your city. But it’s starting to smell a little bit like barbecue, and your eyes are getting watery. What should you do?
Wildfire smoke contains tiny particles, invisible to the human eye, that can enter your lungs and bloodstream. Those particles can exacerbate the risk of having an asthma attack, heart attack, and stroke. They also have lasting effects on your heart and respiratory system, and can lead to premature death. You really want to take the likelihood that smoke is getting into your home seriously.
But that can lead to a lot of questions.
Maybe you have an air purifier. Where should you put it?
Maybe you don’t have an air purifier, but you have a window air conditioner. Is it safe to turn it on?
I called up John Volckens, a professor of mechanical engineering at Colorado State University, and grilled him on every home configuration I could think of to understand how you can protect yourself against the dangers of smoke. Volckens studies air quality, exposure science, and air pollution-related disease. He has even pioneered the development of new pollution sensor technologies. Hehad a lot of helpful tips to offer.
It’s important to understand there’s really no way to fully prevent smoke from getting inside your home. Even if you don’t smell it or feel its effects, you should do what you can to protect yourself.
That’s because most homes and buildings “breathe.” As the sun heats the upper reaches of the building, it warms the air, which expands and wants to escape. As the air flows out, the lower part of the house, where it’s cooler, draws new air in to replace it.
“The analogy would be like if a 6-foot flood of water came to your house. It doesn’t matter how many sandbags you have, the water’s coming in, right?” Volckens said. “If the air quality index is like 400 outside for a few hours, it’s going to get to like 200 inside your home no matter what.”
The number one thing you can do is get an air purifier. You might not be able to find one in stores right now or have one delivered in time, but there are other options, too, as I’ll discuss below.
Place it wherever you are.
We spend a third of our lives in bed, so Volckens said he likes to have one in the bedroom. “If you have seasonal allergies, creating that kind of safe space for your immune system can be really helpful,” he told me.
But if you only have one device, when you’re done sleeping, just pick it up and move it into the kitchen, office, or living room with you. It should only take about an hour to work its magic and get whatever room you’re in to the best air quality that it’s capable of.
Window AC units work by recirculating the air in your apartment, so they won’t exacerbate the issue and are generally safe to use. The filters in your window units won’t do much to improve your air, though — they are designed to catch larger particles like dust and animal fur, and smoke particles will slip right through.
If you have a central air conditioning system that delivers cool air through ducts and vents, that’s another story. Those are typically designed to draw in air from the outside. In that case, the best thing to do is install what’s called a MERV filter, which you can purchase at most hardware stores or big box stores. Volckens recommends picking up a filter rated MERV-13, which can capture the smallest particles at a relatively high rate.
“It will probably be like 75% efficient. So if 100 wildfire smoke particles pass through that filter, only 25 will get through,” he said. “You're going to knock down the concentration significantly, especially as that filter keeps cycling air through your home.”
The one thing to keep in mind is that these filters are so good, they will get clogged quickly. A clogged filter will cause your HVAC system to work too hard, which could lead to mechanical issues, so make sure you remember to replace it every couple of months.
What's the alternative to an air purifier?
DIY air filters are surprisingly easy to make and incredibly effective. No, really. All you have to do is buy a box fan, duct tape, and a MERV filter. Tape the filter to the back of the box fan. That’s it.
“They work just as well as commercial air cleaners,” said Volckens. They’re a little bit louder, but otherwise, it’s the exact same idea. “A commercial air purifier might have a fancier fan and a fancier filter, but it’s still just a fan and a filter.”
And if you want to get a little fancier, you can build what’s called a Corsi-Rosenthal box. It’s the same idea, but envelops the fan intake in four filters instead of one. The Washington Post has a very easy-to-follow video showing how to build one. “They work as best as the highest-end air cleaners you could buy for one-fifth or one-tenth of the cost,” said Volckens.
N-95 masks, like the kind recommended to protect against COVID-19, also effectively filter out pollution, and are your best bet. Even a blue surgical mask will be somewhat helpful, said Volckens.
If you’re tired of being cooped up at home, you can also find what Volckens likes to call “clean air zones.” He recommended the public library, a Starbucks, or any other public building. Go support your local movie theater.
“Most public buildings actually have more efficient air cleaning than homes because the buildings were built more recently and they’re built to code standards that require cleaner air.”
Wildfire smoke is truly disgusting. The particles can contain thousands of chemicals, and they will stick to any surface they touch — the ceiling, the carpet, your clothing. You can certainly wash your clothes and linens, but it might not be possible to scrub every surface of your home.
“The best thing you can do when the air does clean up is to just open all your windows and get some good air exchange going,” said Volckens. “I guarantee, yes, you’ll have that wildfire smell for a couple of days, but it will eventually go away.”
Before we hung up, I asked Volckens if there were any other tips we didn’t cover.
“The only thing I’ll say is that this problem isn’t going away,” he said. “And it’s our doing, right? This is the result of a warming planet.”
This article was last updated on June 28, 2023.
Read more about wildfire smoke :
The 5 Big Questions About the 2023 Wildfire Smoke Crisis
Wednesday Was the Worst Day for Wildfire Pollution in U.S. History
When There’s Smoke, Getting Indoors Isn’t Enough
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PJM is projecting nearly 50% demand growth through the end of the 2030s.
The nation’s largest electricity market expects to be delivering a lot more power through the end of the next decade — even more than it expected last year.
PJM Interconnection, which covers some or all of 13 states (and Washington, D.C.) between Maryland and Illinois, released its latest long-term forecast last week, projecting that its summer peak demand would climb by almost half, from 155,000 megawatts in 2025 to around 230,000 in 2039.
The electricity market attributed the increased demand to “the proliferation of data centers, electrification of buildings and vehicles, and manufacturing,” and noted (not for the first time) that the demand surge comes at the same time many fossil fuel power plants are scheduled to close, especially coal plants. Already, some natural gas and even some coal plants in PJM andelsewhere that were scheduled to close have seen their retirement dates pushed out in order to handle forecast electricity demand.
This is just the latest eye-popping projection of forthcoming electricity demand from PJM and others — last year, PJM forecast summer peak demand of about 180,000 megawatts in 2035, a figure that jumped to around 220,000 megawatts in this year’s forecast.
While summer is typically when grids are most taxed due to heavy demand from air conditioning, as more of daily life gets electrified — especially home heating — winter demand is forecast to rise, too. PJM forecast that its winter peak demand would go from 139,000 megawatts in 2025, or 88% of the summer peak, to 210,000 megawatts in 2039, or 95% of its summer peak demand forecast for that year.
Systems are designed to accommodate their peak, but winter poses special challenges for grids. Namely, the electric grid can freeze, with natural gas plants and pipelines posing a special risk in cold weather — not to mention that it’s typically not a great time for solar production, either.
Aftab Khan, PJM’s executive vice president for operations, planning, and security, said in a statement Thursday that much of the recent demand increase was due to data centers growing “exponentially” in PJM’s territory.
The disparity between future demand and foreseeable available supply in the short term has already led to a colossal increase in “capacity” payments within PJM, where generators are paid to guarantee they’ll be able to deliver power in a crunch. These payments tend to favor coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants, which can produce power (hopefully) in all weather conditions whenever it’s needed, in a way that variable energy generation such as wind and solar — even when backed up by batteries — cannot as yet.
Prices at the latest capacity auction were high enough to induce Calpine, the independent power company that operates dozens of natural gas power plants and recently announced a merger with Constellation, the owner of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, to say it would look at building new power plants in the territory.
The expected relentless increase in power demand, power capacity, and presumably, profits for power companies, was thrown into doubt, however, when the Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek released a large language model that appears to require far less power than state of the art models developed by American companies such as OpenAI. While the biggest stock market victim has been the chip designer Nvidia, which has shed hundreds of billions of dollars of market capitalization this week, a number of power companies including Constellation and Vistra are down around 10%, after being some of the best stock market performers in 2024.
A conversation with Carl Fleming of McDermott Will & Emory
This week we’re talking to Carl Fleming, a renewables attorney with McDermott Will & Emory who was an advisor to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo under the Biden administration. We chatted the morning after the Trump administration attempted to freeze large swathes of federal spending. My goal? To understand whether this chaos and uncertainty was trickling down into the transition as we spoke. But Fleming had a sober perspective and an important piece of wisdom: stay calm and remain on course.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
How are you seeing the private sector respond to all of this news?
My view is, you can read a lot into what people publish in the EOs and what’s written and what’s issued and you can sometimes read a good deal into what hasn’t been issued and what hasn’t been said. In the executive orders that got first issued in a flurry we saw a few that got pointed directly at onshore wind, some on offshore wind, but solar and standalone storage – as predicted – remained pretty much intact.
We were under the impression and we stood by it that we had the guidance in hand, bankable guidance, from the IRS prior to the change in administration and prior to any look-back window that people had been transacting on over the past year at kind of a record pace. Standalone storage has just had a breakout year. Solar continues to go, to continue to be put on the grid. And we also have manufacturing of solar panels, the domestic supply chain. This year we stood up is nowhere near what we need to fulfill our requirements to get everything we need to do domestically to fill our generation requirements [but] its a pretty great step in the right direction. And those credits have been pretty good to the economy and Republican states.
The way I’ve seen people react is, I’ve probably been busier than ever the past two weeks, not only fielding questions like that but also for tax credit transfers, all of the corporates we work with. We work in both the buy and the sell side of all these credit transfers. We’re working with a lot of solar module manufacturers to sell the credits under the IRA. We’re working with a lot of buyers to purchase those credits. And we’re working with the buyers and sellers under the generation of these projects.
All of the buyers have come out and continued with their 2025 strategy to buy more of these credits, if not more so. And all of the developers we represent continue to produce more of these credits. So I haven’t seen a hiccup or slowdown in actual transactions. If anything, I’ve seen stuff pick up in the solar space and in the manufacturing space. I continue to be very optimistic about those two fundamental parts of the energy transition, because if you need to go be an energy superpower, you wouldn’t want to turn off solar, turn off storage –
Is that argument that if you were trying to deal with “energy security,” you wouldn’t turn off solar and storage – is that enough to assuage uncertainty in the investor space?
I think it’s helpful. If you’re a private equity investor or you’re any sort of lender or a developer, you’re probably not going to base your whole model on the hopes that our energy security strategy syncs up with what most people think it should look like. But when you layer it on top of some of the fundamentals… I want to say that solar did not go away eight years ago. When Trump first came in, we saw more renewables deployed in his administration. At times, we saw more beneficial guidance, issuance of tax guidance under that administration, than we would hope for from some more favorable administrations.
The fact that the IRA has disproportionately benefited red states is just a fact that can’t be overlooked. I met with a group of about two dozen lawmakers a few weeks ago to talk about the IRA and there’s quite a few of those folks in the room that say, “Whatever we do, we can’t dismantle the IRA.”
But how has the chaos in the last week and a half impacted investment in renewable energy, though?
I think the renewable energy industry is used to a lack of predictability. It’s kind of a lawyer’s job, our team’s job, to help folks mitigate risk [and] to see what potential pitfalls there may be and to structure and draft around those.
You might see as things get more unpredictable, as folks go out to investors to raise capital, you might see a little bit of tightening around different portfolios or different types of companies based on their pipelines or how they’re put together. But I think one investor’s look on a project or pipeline may vary widely from another investor who’s got a different project or pipeline. There’s a lot of capital out there to be deployed. I think people are looking to invest.
I think you just need to partner the right developers with the right investors.
Are you seeing any slowdown in solar investment though?
I don’t see folks taking a hardline approach or stopping any time soon.
This is not an existential crisis while the ITC [investment tax credit] and PTC [production tax credit] exist. It’s not even, could you go back in time to unwind these credits. It’s moreso, going forward, what will the IRA look like? Will there be additional technologies added to the IRA? That’s possible to help stand up other technologies. Will the runway for the credit, instead of it being unlimited for at least 10 years, will [it] be pared back a bit? There’s potential, but it’s unlikely.
Okay last question and it’s a fun one: what was the last song you listened to?
I’m not going to lie, I’m an Eagles fan. And I’m from Philly and a huge Meek Mill fan. So “Uptown Vibes” by Meek Mill is in the car.
1. Freeze, don’t move – The Trump administration this week attempted to freeze essentially all discretionary grant programs in the federal government. A list we obtained showed this would halt major energy programs and somehow also involve targeting work on IRA tax credits.
2. Sorry, California – The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management canceled public meetings on the environmental impact statement for offshore wind lease areas in California, indicating the Trump wind lease pause will also affect pre-approval activities.
3. Idaho we go – Idaho Gov. Brad Little this week signed an executive order dubbed the SPEED Act aimed at expediting all energy projects, including potentially renewables, transmission, and mining projects.