- I'm Lena Sun.
I'm a health reporter on the National staff
of The Washington Post,
and for the last almost three years
I have been writing about the pandemic.
So, today, I am going to make one
of these do-it-yourself home air-filter systems.
You think about it, in our homes a lot of us
have forced-air heating
or we've done a lot to seal it for energy efficiency,
you have no fresh air coming inside in the wintertime.
And this is a way to clean the air,
not just for COVID or other respiratory things,
but allergens or the particles that happen
when there's a chemical reaction with ozone or cleaning fluids.
And even I can make one,
so hopefully you should be able to make one too.
You want a 20"x20" and preferably by 2 inches
because it's thicker and more stable.
I'm using a 20-inch box fan.
And you also need duct tape and a good pair of scissors.
So, when you put the filters together,
you want to try to make sure that the pleats are vertical,
that the arrows on all the boxes
are pointing inwards to the cube.
And I'm using a little bit of painter's tape
to hold it together while I get all my filters in place.
Okay, so now I'm going to try to seal the sides with duct tape.
If you guys want to stop the filming
and just go to time elapsed.
Let me see.
Have I gotten all the sides?
Okay.
And now you make the base.
And you can make the base by cutting out --
from the box that the fan came in,
because you want it to fit over the filter cube.
Okay, let's see if this fits.
All right, so then you need to tape this base.
Tape up all the sides.
And here you have it.
It's the cube with the box as the base.
And the fan should fit pretty much right over your box.
And you want to make sure that there are no gaps,
so you need to tape this up.
You know, worse comes worst, if you tape it the wrong way,
you just take the tape off and redo it.
No big deal.
You want to seal everything up so there's no leakage.
Okay.
Today I'm going to try something I did not do at home
but is to make a shroud that goes on top of this fan
so that only the circular part is blowing air out.
The best way to do it is to go around
so you don't have to, like, break the outside.
But if you did, you could just tape it up, no big deal.
Okay.
This is the shroud.
It goes on top like this. Well, let's see.
I am so short I cannot even see if it fits,
so I'm going to climb on top of the desk.
Ah, it looks pretty good.
I'm gonna show the home viewers that it looks okay.
So I'm just gonna trim the corners a little bit.
Okay. Now I'm gonna tape up.
We are done.
We have built this filter.
This is what the top looks like.
Yes.
Do you hear the fan?
It's now on the highest speed.
Second.
One.
You have the top of the box
where the clean air is coming out.
You have these air filters that are sucking in the air
that is filled with all sorts of nasty stuff.
And then you are good to go.