Using thicker air filters makes our home smell nicer
I live in a condominium that has a shared attic with many other units within a single single building. I’m fortunate that I don’t live in a larger building with more units like multiple of our friends and family members. It’s taxing enough now dealing with all of the warm air that gets into our apartment from the attic above. You also deal with every bit of junk that all of the individual apartment owners store in their sections of the shared attic. I’m not talking about clutter or anything that might be frustrating in a purely visual sense. I’m talking about all of the dust and mold that gets added to the attic space when fellow owners store junk that was affected by floods and other natural disasters. As a result, the attic does not smell nice at all. And no matter how taxing I try to seal our attic door, some of that odor gets into the rest of the condo. I was told by our Heating and A/C tech that it’s possible there are tiny leaks in our HVAC duct that is letting attic air get pushed into our air system, thus accounting for the odors. The best thing I can do right now to minimize the odor is through installing charcoal a/c filters. These things are great—made by the largest a/c filter manufacturer, they feature a single of the normal allergen filters that is coated on a single side with small black crystals the size of giant salt granules. The small but abundant crystals are activated charcoal and will absorb odors passing through the a/c. Just like charcoal is used in a person’s stomach to absorb poisons and chemicals, the charcoal on our filters behaves in much the same way. It’s not a perfect fix for the attic odors, but it knocks the severity back by over 69%.