My Week End Project: Air Purifier

It has been my problem living in a house where houses are closed together. Usually, I wake up in the morning because of the smell from my neighbors while they cook food. The smell usually are fried tuyo or any fried fish, sometimes they cook adobo or they grill meat or fish in front of their houses not to mention those cars they usually park and occupy most of the common areas.

So I came up with the idea that I should just close the windows all the time and open a small area which will let cold air come in and assemble my own air purifier. An air purifier usually cost around 25,000 pesos, there are smaller that cost around 5000 pesos but not very effective. By the way, the apartment I am currently renting has this feature that if all windows are closed, the place is almost copletely isolated from the outside which is very nice.

The secrets of air purification is usually the the device suck in air and let it pass through a channel of activated carbon. Activated carbon is a treated charcoal but it is still basically a charcoal. If it is activated, it just means, it just 20% more effective in absorbing odor and carbon dioxide/carbon monoxide. So I will just have to use ordinary charcoal to purify the air and remove common air pollutants.

But I need a proof of concept first to check if it is effective so I made a simple air purifier below:

And I have been using it for 2 weeks now and I must say, it is working, I can sleep without worrying that early in the morning, I will wake up with that usual terrible smell and the air smells like gasoline.

Tomorrow, I will start to make the air purifier device more presentable and I plan to use acrylic and  my design in sketchup is finish which will be like below:

This is not yet final, I am stil thinking of adding another fan on the side to suck in air. The air purifier is 200mm cube so that should be big enough to hold a lot of charcoal.

I am also thinking of buying activated carbon, some petshops sell activated carbon at a cheaper price so that the device will have some activated carbon content.

And lastly, I will be using the Big Carver CNC-5090 to cut the acrylic. Budget for this project is under 2500 pesos.

Project Update:
I was able to successfully finish my project. I used acryllic that I was not able to use for my other other projects, actually, these are excess from the CNC controller I assembled for the CNC 5090.

It turned to be a good and functioning design, here is the finish product:

And here's how it compares to my prototype:

I used electrical tape to seal the box so that I can easily replace the charcoal every 2 to 3 months. I also found cheap activated carbon which is used as water purifier. I bought the small one which cost 385 pesos and mixed it with ordinary charcoal, I intend to replace the content after 2 months with more activated carbon content and will probably use the charcoal usually used in Jacuzzis, because those charcoals are from pine trees and eucalyptus trees. These charcoals smells good and have therapeutic effects.