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Consider the house located in an extreme climate- hot or cold. Fresh air is nice, but bringing in outside air wastes the energy used to reduce or increase its temperature. Also, outside air has dust and allergens. One can reuse inside air and so retain air conditioned to a livable temperature. Air
filters clog with crud and must be changed - that devil called Maintenance! Ionizers simply charge airborne crud and make it stick to walls. Is there not some way to clean and reuse inside air with no maintenance or thought?
Consider the bathroom in an extreme climate. Ideally the poop-scented air is jettisoned outside - but here too one wastes climate conditioning and must take in dirty hot or cold outside air to replace.
We at BUNGCO turned our thoughts to the humble bong. A bong filters air by passage through water. Water is cheap and replaceable, a good filter, and it does not wear out. Could we filter air with water?
Introducing the Potty Bong Air Filter. Each toilet has a tank of clean water held in reserve for flush. The PBAF uses that water to filter air. The PBAF is a toilet tank lid with a fan that pushes air down under the water. It bubbles up in a bonglike fashion, then escapes back into the bathroom. This deposits material in the tank water, which is jettisoned with the next flush. In a very arid climate, PBAF treated air may deplete the water in the tank. Fortunately the tank will fill itself back up automatically - it is a toilet!
Used intermittently the PBAF can substitute for an exhaust fan. Left on, the PBAF conditions air for the whole house! Retrofitting your toilet with a PBAF requires that you set it down and plug it in: no new holes in the ceiling, no new filters to buy, nothing but clean clean air.
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It's all fun and games until someone puts soap in the tank. |
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Soap in tank or other tank additives might actually help with capturing some odors. Greasy airborne things might be more soluble in soapy water. The soap might also scent the air which can only be good in the bathroom. |
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Low foaming soap. Not dishwashing soap, dang it. |
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Yes, the soap idea is critical, The filtration event occurs at the interface between the air droplet and the surrounding bulk fluid. Smaller droplets, more surface area for filtration. |
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Also, the molecules responsible for imparting smell are extremely small. Basically, either micron sized pieces of shit or pure gasses. These smallies will be able to stay on the interior of the bubble and avoid sedimentation, the leading cause of particulate deposition in an air/fluid emulsion. Long story short, I don't know how well this will work. |
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Pot bongs don't filter anything but large pieces of plant matter that get sucked through the hole. This prevents unwanted chunks getting into your mouth, which is nice. Also, the water helps cool the air, and ice water helps in this regard to impart cool smoke into the user's lungs, fooling the poor bastard into thinking he's gotta pull harder, until the whole hit is exhausted in a single harrowing cough... which is a big waste, since it takes time to absorb the THC, and all that stuff coughed out is essentially unabsorbed. Of course, the user doesn't realize this loss, because his head is so charged from the cough he thinks he's actually done something right. |
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To sum it up. If water filtered bong smoke as effectively as you want it to filter bathroom air, nobody would ever use it in a bong. |
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In the happy event that the PBAF proves so effective that it renders the water super duper stinky with impurities from the air, one could replace the flapper valve with one like mine that is several years old and slowly leaks. |
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In your defense, it seems sulfur compounds and short chain fatty acids are somewhat soluble in water, so you may have luck getting rid of those. But the dissolution event will take place due to gaseous diffusion, and you'll need your bubble sufficiently submerged for a period of time for this to take place. Perhaps a pump that sucks air from the environment and releases it to the bottom of the tank would allow for longer contact and more complete dissolution of your gasses and airborne acids. Back to neutral. |
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This sort-of reminds me of the idea during the First World Unpleasantness, during gas attacks, soldiers would urinate on scarves in lieu (should that be "loo"?) of a proper gas mask [+] |
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Pondering this one again and daseva's comments about bubbles. Big bonglike bubbles are bad because the air in them is not optimally purified by water contact. |
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One answer would be to expel the air thru a mesh - but the mesh would foul with dust, defeating the whole maintenance free piece. Another solution would be to forcefully expel the air in a turbulent jet, mechanically mixing bubbles with water. I like that one because you could do this with a fan, and this thing already is a fan. |
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I would like to use one of those blade free fans where high velocity air jets entrain air and move it along - this again to minimize contact between unpurified air and anything the dust might stick to, like fan blades. |
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You want to use a fish tank aerator to filter your bathroom air supply? |
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That is the whole point of this idea! |
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