People complain about the air quality in Delhi/NCR a lot (and I am one of them). The Delhi government tries to blame it all on the annual burning of crops in Punjab but that is just an excuse as that happens once a year and the quality is bad through out the year. A few years ago I was in at our place in Noida and I walked out of my room & looked at the living room and found the view to be hazy. At first I thought that this was due to me not wearing my glasses but then realized that it was smog inside our house. I immediately searched for and installed my old air purifier (from our days in the US) and within a short time the haziness was gone.
Recently I bought the PHILIPS High Efficiency Air Purifier AC2887/20 for my house in Bangalore and when I saw how effective it is, I got the same thing for the parents to use in Delhi as well. The one I have in Bangalore ran 24/7 while there was construction going on inside our house (we had the bathrooms renovated) and I had no issues/allergic reactions due to the work being done. Without the purifier I would have been on a constant diet of Allegra the entire day with splitting headaches. You can imagine the amount of dust being generated due to the work but the purifier took it all in stride and I cleaned the external filter once because I thought I should (no alerts to clean came on) after the construction was done.
My father started using the purifier about a month ago (finally!) when the pollen season started and his allergies kicked in. It ran in his room mostly at the night and sometimes during the day as well. Earlier this week after he had been using it for about a month, he pinged me to ask for a particular error code being displayed on the purifier meant, so I found the manual for the device and looked it up. The error code (F0) meant that the external filter needed to be cleaned for the device to work at peak efficiency.
I ran it with construction going on in the other room and the filter never got so bad that the device had to ask me to clean it. Delhi/Noida air quality on the other hand is so bad that they had to clean it within a month of using it normally. Now tell me that the air quality in NCR is not bad! Plus there is no burning’s happening right now or Diwali so you can’t blame it on that either. No wonder Delhi was rated the most polluted capital city in the world.
Delhi Air Pollution: Real-time Air Quality Index (AQI) (Source: aqicn.org)
There needs to be an active urgent effort by the Government to reduce the pollution level, similar to what was done in the early 2000’s when the air quality had improved for a brief time after all the public transports were moved to CNG.
Till then I am going to ensure that the purifier is constantly running at home in Delhi. I don’t do it in the Bangalore house regularly but I do run a purifier in the car to reduce my exposure.
– Suramya