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Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

Dust mite allergens are huge compared to all the PM2.5 crud that air filters mostly worry about. Almost any filter will remove dust mite allergens that actually get in the filter.

Try the usual low-tech stuff: wash bedding in hot water. Encase your mattress and pillows in appropriate material (very fine mesh or a membrane — there are products sold for this exact purpose, and mattress spill protectors work too). Wash those protectors occasionally in hot water as well.

Fit a HEPA filter on your vacuum and vacuum regularly. Wear a mask while cleaning.

Also, dust mites need quite high relative humidity to grow and moderately high RH to even survive. This is relative humidity where the dust mites are. So if you can arrange to keep any rugs and carpets that you have warm, they will have lower RH and fewer dust mites.

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The original article's unit flow rate must have been underpowered then. Or the filter had insufficient holding capacity before passing the dust mite allergen particles back into the air. It never seemed to catch enough of what it passed through. Regardless, it was completely insufficient for the palpable relief I was accustomed to.

I use the Wirecutter's Coway unit recommendation mostly. I have not tried the larger IKEA unit but at least it seemed to mitigate the above.

Good notes, thanks for sharing, I do already take those precautions, mop weekly, no rugs, prefer ample fresh air (ERV or window), and now mostly rely on HEPA filters for extra relief during exercise (kicked up dust), when I'm struggling, or in pollen season. The new nasal azelastine antihistamine also helpful.

Even true HEPA filters can also get inundated a bit too quickly (1-5 mo) in my house otherwise and if I don't notice that, it's worse than nothing. So excepting pollen season, fresh air has a better failure mode.

To affect relative humidity to <50% for mites, unfortunately as far as I can tell, high humidity requires kilowatts of electricity to drop in older buildings in rainy climates, esp. without sealing and compromising air quality in other ways (CO2 too).

No ordinary filter should pass dust mite allergens (or pretty much any particle) just because it’s overloaded. Electrostatic precipitators will, but those are essentially worthless for residential applications.

Maybe the Coway throws the filtered air in a more useful place for your use case?

(Also, and this is utterly silly but I’ve gotten this wrong myself: the IKEA filters come with a plastic wrap on the filter. You need to open it up and remove the plastic. If you skip this step, you have a somewhat noisier than expected think that looks like a filter but provides no filtration whatsoever. Whoops.)

P.S. Azelastine is not new at all. What is new is “Astepro”, which is the same thing, plus sucralose, and it’s OTC. The version without sucralose can be purchased pretty much anywhere in the US with a prescription, as a generic or a name brand product.

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