When I started Smart Air, a lot of people asked me how long the HEPAs last. Several people criticized the DIY on Zhihu because they said you’d probably have to change the HEPA so often that it’d end up being more expensive than the expensive brands.

At the time, I really wanted to pull out a nice round number, but I couldn’t think of any way to answer the question without getting hard data first, so I started doing tests (well, actually Gus did). At 90 days, we found it worked as well as in the beginning. At day 130, we found a 4% decline. Now we’ve finished 170 days!

Methods: 

Gus used the Original DIY and the same HEPAs we ship from Smart Air every night in the 12.3 m² bedroom in his Beijing apartment. Gus used the same method as my previous tests to calculate effectiveness—the percentage reduction of particles .5 microns and above from the room air overnight.

To smooth out the variability in any single datapoint, I averaged the effectiveness over each 10-day period. (More details on the methods here.) Here’s what a single test day looks like:

Results: 

At day 100, the effectiveness dropped by about 4%. It stayed at around that level, until day 140, when it dropped 5-10%. After that point, the total effectiveness has bounced between 65-80%.

Conclusion:

In this test with real-life Beijing air, the Smart Air HEPA lasted 100 days at about 8 hours a day at full effectiveness (729 hours to be precise). People who want every percent of effectiveness should change HEPAs after 100 days. People who don’t mind the 4% drop, I’d recommend replacing it by 140 days (1,028 hours).

For now, the test continues! I’ll post the final results when we finally run this HEPA into the ground.

As always, I’m posting the raw data as a download here, and there are more details on the methods in my earlier post.