Transcript
Have you ever gone to the Home Depot and saw a big line of filters and thought, oh my gosh, which one is the right one for me?
Am I wasting my money? Am I helping myself out? Well, today we’re going to answer those questions for you. I’m Dave Greer from Greer Heating and Air, and we’re about to delve into filters.
So one of the first questions you might have is, do I have a filter?
If you have an HVAC system, you have a filter.
Not changing your filter. Seems like a an easy enough thing, but it can actually kill your system. Our little saying is that dirt kills, and it is by far the number one reason of system failure.
Let’s move to our next question is, right. I know, I have one, and I need to change it, but which one do I need?
So there’s a few acronyms out there that are going to help you to be able to figure out which one is going to be the quality filter for you.
The first of these, and I really think this is the most important of these is MERV. It’s M E R V stands for minimum efficiency reporting value and super easy to remember. That’s why I have it written down, because I never can remember it. But minimum efficiency reporting value. MERV. Right. MERV goes from anywhere from 1 to 16.
Sometimes people will tell you it goes to 20. It does not. It only goes to 16. I’m not sure where that started, but. But those things that live on the internet, they just live forever. But, it’s 1 to 16. One would be the least effective MERV rating. 16 would be the most effective.
So the least one you would want to buy for your home is a MERV eight. And so it’s kind of put that in your in your, in your brain. MERV eight is the least that I would want for my house. A MERV 13 is going to be the most that you would ever want for your home, unless you have a very specific medical condition going on, and you would know that from your doctor or whoever is telling you about that kind of stuff.
I tell you, you don’t need above a MERV 13, usually 10 or 11 you get this could be the sweet spot. You’re going to get a lot of filtration for that. But you’re not going to spend a ton of money on it, and it’s not going to harm your system. So it’s a good place to be. Now there’s another rating that we have.
And if you go to Home Depot, they rate their specific, filters with a what’s called FPR filter performance rating of the, the Home Depot is the only people uses FPR. And, what it’s measuring is how much pollutants or the level of pollutants that this thing will capture. And it goes anywhere from 4 to 10. Should be on any Home Depot filter. The MERV rating should be there already.
If you go buy a 3M, product which makes Filtrete well, they couldn’t use FPR and why would they want to use MERV?
We gotta make up our own. Right. So they’ve got, MPR, micro particle performance rating, and this rolls off the tongue too. So again, this is measuring how many micro particles are trapped by the filter. And it ranges anywhere from 0.3 to 1 micron. So it’s pretty stinking small. This is these are good filters that they’re putting out, MPR ratings though are not .3 to 1, which would just make all the sense in the world. No, it ranges from 300 to 2800.
Now that you’re thoroughly confused, there’s a little chart that’s up here on the screen. This is really going to help us out to figure this thing out.
So that’s the minimum one you would want would be a MERV 6 to 8.
And that works out to be a 600 to 900 MPR and an FPR of five. And that’s in the green box here. Let’s go get large particles such as mold spores and, dust mites. If you go from MERV eight to MERV 11, which I think is kind of the sweet spot to be in, and that’s an MPR of 1000 to 1200 and an FPR of seven. And then you will get medium particles such as pollen and pet dander.
And then in the blue, there’s MERV 11 to 13, which is an MPR rating of 1500 and above, which go only up to 2800. Again, and an FPR of ten, which is the highest that one’s rated. This gets small particles, such as smoke and even some bacteria.
Okay. So now we’ve talked enough about what filters are, what they’re, they’re about. Let’s actually look at one right quick and see what it is we’re going to be buying at the store.
So this is a common filter that you would find a pack of two of these runs around $5. And we’ll find out here in a second why only $5. So it comes, with a label on here that’s telling you, a lot of good information. First and most obvious is the actual size, the dimensions of the filter that you need to get is, the width, the length and this also going to tell you the thickness.
Most every one that you would see in your ceiling or your wall is going to be one inch thick, almost every single one. So that last number is going to be that. So in this particular case we got 20 by 25 by one. So the 20 by 25 is the dimensions here. One is the thickness.
And you can see the let me say it’s one inch thick, but this thing is not one inch thick. Is not even close to being one inch thick. In fact, it is so thin you can see me through it. Look at that. My, one of my coworkers, used to say, if you can read a newspaper through it, it ain’t doing much.
And, that is kind of what, this $5 filter for two. So only $2.50. That’s what it’s doing for you. Now, what is this filter? Why would you want this filter? A couple good reasons. If you have a really, really old duct system, it is probably not designed for new equipment. And this is going to be so restrictive, putting even a good filter in, is going to further restrict your system, and this is going to actually work against you. And act like it’s a dirty filter, even though it’s perfectly clean. So this might be what you need to do, in a stopgap until you can get to replacing your duct system. Getting a properly engineered duct system. Or you have a bigger filter underneath your house and you’re just trying to catch dog hair. So you’ve got a couple pets that just shed like crazy.
And so you put these in and you change them every couple weeks, and they’re so thin, they’re not really doing any damage, to your system. So those are really the only reasons you would have these if you didn’t, have those two situations. Don’t buy this. There’s nothing going on here.
As we move up in filters, we’re gonna this one’s a 300. And it also tells us the MERV rating on there is a five. So this is not even the minimum that we would want for our house.
But when I take this out of the case, you can see right away this is a much better filter than that thing I was just holding on to. This is a way, way better filter, and it’s not even close to where we want to be. But again, this is going to tell you a lot of material or a lot of data on the, the, the label.
And this one in particular has a ton of material that one had almost nothing on it. And to tell you, it still has the arrow. It still tells you the size. But you’ll notice the most obvious thing here is that it’s pleated.
And a pleated filter is going to have a whole lot more material in it.
This is a 2020 filter. It also has wire now. So of this, that little almost invisible, filament that was running through this has an actual wire that’s acting as a support to keep it from, from busting through.
And what I did is I took one of these a 20 by 20. And you see, this is the same size. And I ripped off the outside material. And this is what actually is inside of a 20 by 20 filter. And it’s about twice as much as that first filter we had. And why is this important? All right.
So the thickness of this didn’t really change a whole lot. It’s still very very thin. It’s a tighter weave that’s on here. So it is going to catch more material. But we’re not going to block air trying to get through here so much. And now we have a whole lot more material that can catch stuff. And this is going to add to the longevity of the filter.
So we can we can get through a month or maybe we can get through three months with it, but it’s also going to give us a lot of places to put stuff. Look how many places we can put stuff here. There’s a lot of dirt can be collected here. We can put a lot of stuff in here. We could not put a lot of stuff on that first one that I showed you.
Let’s get to the big one right quick. Let’s talk about the Mac daddy right quick. This one is the one that I actually have in my home.
In fact, I went under my house and pulled this one out before we did this. And I didn’t pull it out of my system. I pulled it out from under my house because I haven’t replaced it yet. Yeah, but we’re going to in just a little while. And, look how thick this sucker is. That one is four inches thick. All right, it says on the side here that it’s five inches thick, but it’s kind of a… It’s actually the five inch container that it goes into, but it’s four inches thick. So, first off, notice to make this one strong, we’ve added some cardboard in here. We still have that wire, but this wire is actually even thicker than that wire was before.
We’ve bent the edges over on it to give it a lot of strength. You would really have to stomp on this to break that side off of this thing. Even put some on the front. But, I mean, this thing is really, really well built. And look how the depth of these ridges here. I mean, there’s a lot of material in here, so this is one that I tore apart just so I can see how much material is in there. It is a lot, lot more material that is in here. In fact, this is like the this is like the scroll here.
I mean, this is going on and on and on. It is an amazing amount of material that is included in this four inch media filter. Works out to about eight feet. It’s a lot. All right. This is a really, really good filter. It’s a MERV 11. So the density, the thickness of it going through is not so great that it’s going to mess things up, but there’s so much material because it’s going back and forth and back and forth that that filter lasts year on just about everybody’s home,
Remember, that first filter was two of them, for $5. So $2.50 apiece. The second one I showed you was seven bucks, right.
This one is $40. You’re like, oh my gosh, how can I spend $40 on a filter? Well, you’re only changing it once a year, and it’s only one of them for the entire house.
So you can see here in this picture, this is the filter box for the large four inch media filter. All you have to do is just grab that little handle, pull out, and it just opens right up. There’s no locks or screwdriver or anything like that needed. Grab hold of the filter, pull it out, take your new filter, slide it in, take the door, stick it back on, you’re good to go for another year.
We do the math right quick, but if say have three of the medium one, that’s $21 times 12 months, or $40 times one year. It’s a big difference. You get a way, way better filter and, you’re spending way, way less money on it. Usually it takes about three years to break even on that. And for the rest of your life, you have that filter, that filter system in your home, and then you just put money in your pocket.
So hopefully we’ve been able to answer your questions about your HVAC filters. If you have any other questions feel free to give us a call.
