YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Alrighty, don't a lot of people already do this? Sometimes I'll do both an air purifier white noise and some music or something from myNoise

The Austin Air HealthMate is great as a noise machine. Very loud. It’s a HEPA filter and lasts 5 years. Never seen any other that lasts that long, but you pay for it upfront. after-market replacements are $250-300 for another 5 years.

An air purifier is a good addition to a kids bedroom.

I got one during Santa Cruz wildfires in 2020 and now the kids have a pavlovian reflex to sleep once that gets turned on.

Ikea makes an air-purifier table, which is a end-run around it being a useless box in the room when switched off.

It's fairly expensive, not as good as a purpose built one, but it blends into the average room pretty well.

I've considered an air purifier for allergy reasons, but...

>removes smoke and infectious particles

Where do people live that they need to remove such things, 18th century London?

I bought a large soldering iron air purifier and it turns out to be great; it has a continuious speed selector, easy to replace filters, and very pleasant spectrum. I like it better than the air conditioner, which cycles on and off noisily.

  >Of course, the problem with this is you are just spending more money on filters, which is the expensive part.

Does that mean your air doesn't get filtered if you stop or decide to turn down the white noise?

I prefer having quiet air filters that I can run all day (based on air quality) instead of noisy ones I only use at night.

An air purifier is the best noise machine for me, much better than the white noise machines with the tinny speakers. Even the brown noise setting on those isn't nearly deep enough to let me sleep.

Air purifier is gonna use a lot more energy than just a small speaker. The energy cost swamps everything long term

I prefer pink noise.

You can use them as random number generators, to replace your lava lamp for example.

Glad to see I'm not the only person who does this

True, mine does that job really well too. Not too much high in it either, just a nice low rumble.

For sleeping I prefer rain sounds though

What are people's target AQIs? I have indoor monitors in our high-rise building in SF and live 100 m from the freeway and we have:

    PM2.5: 2.6 µg/m³
    PM10: 0.5 µg/m³
    VOC index: ~97
    CO₂: ~505 ppm

That's the baseline. When we're cooking, like now, it's:

    PM2.5: 10.8 µg/m³ (AQI ~46)
    PM10: 17.5 µg/m³
    VOC index: 122
    CO₂: 572 ppm

None of those seem particularly concerning. We have a gas range, and 15 min past the end of cooking everything is fine. I must imagine that most people don't live right next to the freeway so they probably have even better air quality except during wildfire season.

This makes me wonder, for a truly travel-size solution (or just otherwise compact needs), if there's a viable alternative that directs filtered air at a sleeper's head? In other words, would the net effect be equivalent for one person (such that they're breathing more or less the same cleanness of air)?

I grasp that such an approach might draw unfiltered surrounding air along with the filtered stream of air, and imagine that it would likely be easily overwhelmed by a steady supply of exceptionally polluted air (wildfire smoke or simply a heavily polluted urban area), but I still would be interested in knowing if the compromise never overcomes a level of placebo effect, or if there's a point where it actually achieves measurable benefit (both in efficacy and portability—like a even more compact and directional version of the Corsi-Rosenthal computer fan solution.)