Clean Air Act

The most thorough living-room air filter catches bacteria so you don't

Filtering your air is one thing; purifying it is another—and one you don't think about until flu season hits. But Oreck's XL Professional Air T Purifier ($800, oreck.com) is the first to do just that in a living-room-friendly package, using virus-zapping technology previously seen only in nuclear submarines. The XL catches and destroys particles down to .009 microns, killing 98 percent of airborne allergens (dust, pollen, smoke), along with bacteria, viruses, and mold. So when your co-workers start calling in sick, you can breathe easy. You won't even have to sweat the power bill: the XL costs as much to run as a 70-watt lightbulb.

Making the Cleanest Air

The bottom fan sucks air through a basket filter that catches large particles like hair. Then the air enters the Truman cell, where an electromagnetic field positively charges particles so that negatively charged plates inside the cell can collect them. Nonliving things stick, but biological bits, such as viruses, get zapped by the plates' 8,000 volts. Next, an aluminum mesh filter with a metal-oxide coating removed odors. An ozone scrubber splits ozone into safer oxygen, and fans blow the clean air out at a 45-degree angle so that the purifier doesn't reprocess it. The air in a 10-by-15-foot room is recycled every eight minutes.

--Sarah Z. Wexler

Published in Popular Science, October, 2006