Mountain View Pure Water Podcast

Breathing Easy: Your Home's Air Quality Guide

• Dan Toth • Episode 11

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How Do I Know If My Home Air Quality Is Poor?

Breathing clean air isn't just a luxury—it's essential for your health, sleep quality, and overall wellbeing. Yet many homeowners remain unaware of the telltale signs of poor indoor air quality or how to effectively address them.

In this eye-opening conversation, air quality expert Dan Toth cuts through the confusion surrounding home air purification. He reveals why many popular air purifiers are little more than "fans with filters" that simply redistribute dust rather than removing it, and explains the dangerous misconception that installing a heavy-duty filter on your HVAC system will solve your air quality issues. As Dan warns, this common approach can actually damage your equipment, increase energy costs, and leave your air just as contaminated as before.

The discussion dives deep into what truly matters when selecting air purification systems, from proper sizing and HEPA filtration to sanitization capabilities that neutralize harmful VOCs and destroy biological contaminants like mold spores and viruses. Dan shares insights from his 30 years of industry experience, contrasting disposable store-bought units with professional-grade systems like those from Aerus (formerly Electrolux) that offer exceptional durability and performance. Perhaps most impressively, Mountain View Pure has never needed to repair a single system due to mechanical failure in nearly five years—a testament to the quality difference that protects both your health and your wallet over time.

Ready to breathe easier? Transform your home's air quality today with a free consultation from the experts who understand the science behind truly clean air. Call or text 423-218-9361 or visit MVPWater.net to learn more about solutions tailored to your specific needs.

To learn more about Mountain View Pure Water & Air visit:
https://www.MVPWater.net
Mountain View Pure Water & Air
2926 Boones Creek Rd Suite #1
Johnson City, TN 37615
423-218-9361

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Mountain View Pure podcast, where your journey to exceptional water quality begins. Here's your host, dan Toth, owner of Mountain View Pure Water. They proudly serve homeowners in the Tri-Cities and beyond, offering advanced water and air purification solutions that support a healthier lifestyle. The mission is clear helping you get great water.

Speaker 2:

Dan outlines the telltale signs of unhealthy air and how to spot the problems before they affect your sleep, your sinuses and your quality of life. Welcome back everybody. Skip Monty here, co-host, slash producer, back in studio with owner of Mountain View Pure Water, Dan Toth. Dan, how's it going?

Speaker 3:

Doing all. Right, skip, how are you?

Speaker 2:

Doing fine. Glad to be back. I think this episode is going to be especially useful for homeowners who aren't sure what signs to look for when it comes to air quality and, more importantly, how do they fix it if they do have air quality issues. So take it away.

Speaker 3:

Yeah Well, I guess we can just get started that all of us have been. Either we're moving into a new home or we've lived in a home for a while. So if we've lived in a home for a while, there's dust, dander, potentially mold, mildew, things like that. If we're in a new home or a remodeled home, there's going to be newer products, surfaces, paint, laminates, things that will off-gas and produce potentially harmful odors and gases, and each of those needs to be addressed for us to have the kind of health that we want inside of our home. Since the home is not going to clean itself, we need to make sure that we are using something to clean the home, and one of the chief things or primary things that people use is they'll buy an air filter. So somebody has a problem with, maybe, animal dander or hair in their home, maybe they'll put in an air filter and they'll buy that from a store. And just because and often we will search for that as kind of like, what size do we need? How much do I have to spend? You know what are the reviews on it? And sometimes that can be kind of like the bottled water thing. If you remember, I asked people how they choose bottled water and it's this one was on sale, or I like the bottle or like the taste, and none of that has to do with bottle water quality that you're drinking. And so when you want to have good air quality, people by and large don't understand if something's actually working. They just understand if it's working for them, and so we call that anecdotal. We have anecdotal reviews. When we buy something online and when we buy something in a store, we often don't even know if there are any reviews showing that that product is good or not.

Speaker 3:

So let me give you a few tips as to how to purchase an air filtration system for your home. One of the things that we take a look at is is there good airflow? Does the product provide good airflow? Is it collecting the contaminants that flow through it, or is it simply redistributing them? A lot of devices do not have a sealed filter area, and so often I call them fans with filters, because all they do is they just blow dust around, and so something's happening. They're running, air movement is happening, but they are redistributing the contaminants, and that doesn't actually help you at all. It's just wasting electricity.

Speaker 3:

So you want to make sure it has a good filtration on it that actually catches the contaminants, and it has to be at least adequate for the space that it's in. You can't have a system that's good for a 150-square-foot room. In your living room and dining room area that might be a total of 600, 700 square feet together, so it's inadequate. You can't possibly filter the air very well in that room. So what is a good way?

Speaker 3:

Most people have central air conditioning and we like to think of putting a really nice filter on the air handler. Well, air conditioning people will tell you that's not actually a very good idea, because as soon as you restrict the airflow, the air conditioner doesn't work as well. You will have loss of efficiency, which means that the system runs longer to do the same work because the airflow is reduced. That will lead to the system running too long, which means that it's running out of the efficient, energy efficient way that it's made to run, and then you'll be paying extra for the electricity to make the system run. The second thing that happens is you can, in the hot times, you know this time of year, you can blow capacitors and fuses and things like that. When it's running too much, the coils can freeze over because there's just not enough air movement and so you don't want to restrict the airflow. The systems are sized properly for your home and you want to make sure that airflow is good. So we don't actually want to put like a HEPA filter on our air conditioning air handler. That just isn't a good idea. So how do you get good air quality if you can't put it on? And that's kind of what we provide here at Mountain View.

Speaker 3:

Pure Water and Air is standalone systems that can be placed in your home in a centralized location. The air handler helps to redistribute the cleaned air, but it's not being restricted because of a filter, so the air handler is separate from the air filter in the home, and so when you have something like that you can maintenance it. It has its own lifespan, which is definitely longer when you get a good quality product. And so here's some of the standard features. One is you do want HEPA filtration. At least HEPA filtration is the standard for air particulate filtration and that's 0.3 microns. 0.3 microns is the size of particulate that will be removed with a HEPA filtration system. So a sealed HEPA system means that all the air that's brought into that filter never escapes.

Speaker 3:

You've probably seen a Dyson commercial in your lifetime where they'll show that the air, that all the dust comes in but doesn't go out, and then they'll show another vacuum that, as the vacuum is on, it's just expelling dust that it takes in. You can see the dust in sunlight rays coming into your home. You can see it when there's bright light. But we don't ever want to be picking up dust and expelling it into the environment. That's just a bad idea, because pollen and different things, maybe even mold spores, can be redistributed that way and we don't want to do that. We want to collect all the contaminants and make sure that they are removed from the air. So that's one thing.

Speaker 3:

One of the other options that we have is to have a product that has sanitization. So you have two different styles of sanitization. One style is, as the air comes through the system, the air can be sanitized, and what that means is anything that is inside the air VOCs or living organisms, viruses, bacteria, mold, mildew spores. That stuff is captured or destroyed by some sort of sanitization process. A UV light does that inside the system, and so many people have put something like this in their air duct in the main plenum for their air handler and they feel like that's sanitizing the air.

Speaker 3:

That isn't always the case.

Speaker 3:

There are lots of products out there that are inadequate for the airflow and the volume of air that's going through your air system.

Speaker 3:

So you want to professionally, you want somebody to actually look at that and make sure that not to say that any of the air conditioning companies aren't doing their job, but maybe they aren't trained right.

Speaker 3:

I did mention in our previous podcast that I've been trained pretty well in air purification for about 30 years now, and so you want someone who kind of understands the industry, understands the products, what they're capable of, and so they can inspect to see if what you have already done with your home things that you have already in place, if they're adequate, and anyone who knows me, who's had me come to their house, whether it's for water treatment or air quality, can tell you that if you have something that's already in place and it's working, I'm going to tell you that it's working, I'm going to let you know, and if you need more help, I'll offer.

Speaker 3:

Tell you that it's working, I'm gonna let you know, and if you need more help, I'll offer options for that. So there's not a really a risk to having someone come out and check your home to see if what you have in place Is adequate. The only thing you can find out is hey, if it is, then you have peace of mind, if it's not, then you can fix that. So those are the sorts of things that I try to help people with now with a standalone unit.

Speaker 2:

How does that work? It's not connected to the handler at all. Let the flow there correct, correct.

Speaker 3:

So there's um. The products that we provide are I'm going to just say it, they're eris. Eris is a company that used to be called Electrolux, so if you remember the Electrolux vacuum, that company was a great American company, built a phenomenal product. Many of them many of the originals are still in use today. These are systems that just didn't break. They're made of metal, they're strong construction made them durable and the motors lasted for a long time. So when this company transitioned into air quality, they kept their metal construction and component makeup and they just started to focus more on air purification and filtration. And so this company is actually headquartered right out of Bristol, virginia, and we are a supplier of those products. So it's an American-made product, high quality components, so that you know that the product that you're getting is something that's going to last for a while. This is an appliance. It's going to make sure that we're going to make sure that you have that protection for a long time. So if anything.

Speaker 3:

Let's contrast it with something you purchase in a store. You buy something from Amazon, walmart, walmart, wherever else you like to buy things from and you have a problem with it. It doesn't work, it's just stopped someday. What do you have to do with that? Well, you have a couple of options. If it's within their short warranty time frame, you can take it back or send it back for a replacement, or the company may tell you hey, this is what you need to do, we're going to send you the part, you can service it yourself.

Speaker 3:

But often we know this to be true we just throw it away because it's broken and I don't want to pay for shipping, I don't want to wait for another one to get there, and so we go out and we replace it.

Speaker 3:

And so if that's the sort of thing that you've done in your home, you realize that cheap system becomes pretty expensive when you have to replace it. So you can buy it once, or you can buy it multiple times, and so the products that we provide are well-made component products made of metal and good materials that are able to be fixed, and so that's what we provide for our customers. This has such a strong warranty and it's such a great product. We actually provide a no questions asked two-year exchange. If something stops working on the air quality products within the first two years of ownership, we will literally bring out a brand new product and exchange it for you. We're not trying to fix stuff on site, we just want to make sure that it works really well for you and that you're happy. And the reality is we've never had to replace a product that broke. We've been in business selling these for almost five years now.

Speaker 2:

Wow, and never had a repair. Never had a repair.

Speaker 3:

Never had a broken system. We've had a couple of systems where, um, the particulate content in the house was so high that the filter clogged up and the customer didn't know what was going on. It was our first time experiencing that problem, and so what we did is we brought them out a new product, brand new filter, and within a couple of months, the same thing happened again. So, of course, being problem solvers, we're like hey, wait, you're the only person this is happening to. It must not be the system, it must be something unique to your home. And that's really what it was. We found out that person just needed to clean off the filter more often than most customers, because they had a contaminated environment.

Speaker 3:

So yeah, the system was just fine, it just was getting filled up, so not a lot of stuff.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely, absolutely Well what I was saying. Very few products offer that type of track record. So congrats on that. And guys, you heard it here as strong as an Electrolux, those things. It's amazing there's actually a store in Johnson city that repairs Electrolux vacuum cleaners from like 40 years ago. So good quality stuff. And you said the name of the company now is AERUS.

Speaker 3:

AERUS Yep.

Speaker 2:

Very good, all right, good to know A-E-R-U-S Gotcha. I would not.

Speaker 3:

Sorry Skip, that was A-E-R-U-S, a-e-r-u-s.

Speaker 2:

Gotcha, I would not Sorry Skip that was A-E-R-U-S. A-e-r-u-s Gotcha Gotcha Well. Dan, thanks again for giving us a roadmap to healthier air in our homes and healthier homes for all of our family, and we'll catch you next time on the Mountain View Pure Podcast.

Speaker 3:

Thanks, skip, have a great day.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for joining us on the Mountain View Pure podcast. When you're ready to transform your home's water and air quality, call or text 423-218-9361 for a free in-home consultation. For more information visit mvpwaternet. Remember, great water is the foundation of a great life.