Condo Blues: Ditching the Disposables – Furnace Filters

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Ditching the Disposables – Furnace Filters

When we talk of ditching disposables the most people talk about ditching plastic and paper shopping bags, take out coffee cups, and replacing tissues with handkerchiefs. Have you considered ditching your disposable furnace filter for a reusable electrostatic furnace filter?

This reusable furnace filter is similar to the filter we purchased.
You can learn about it here.

This choice and purchase was Husband’s idea and it was a good one. The reusable electrostatic filters are easy to clean by vacuuming them with the hose attachment of our upright vacuum cleaner. You can rinse them off with water but ours take about a day to dry. Since our furnace won't work without a filter and it's winter and I'd rather not chip ice off of the dog after a day with no heat we don't use the water method often.

Ditching my disposable furnace filter for a reusable filter means that I’m much more likely to change/clean the furnace filter each month and keep my furnace running at maximum efficiency in order to keep our energy bills - and use - as low as I can.


Also no more running out of disposable furnace filters at the first of the month! One less thing I have to buy each month means one less thing I run out of when I need it. Because I do that – do you?

Not to mention there is a whole lot less packaging and dirty disposable furnace filters clogging up my trash can each month. Because there isn't. With the exception of the the packaging from the reusable filter Husband bought two years ago and the dirty disposable filter it replaced.
Sure our reusable electrostatic filter cost a little more upfront (around $20) than the disposable filters ($9 or so each. We used to buy the super duper allergy filtering disposable furnace filters.) The reusable electrostatic furnace filter we purchased is supposed to last for approximately 10 years. Break that down over the life of the filter and that means it costs us 17cents a month. 17 cents? I can do that. Can you?

Using a reusable furnace filter is just one small change I made to meet Hip Mountain Mama's One Small Challenge. She's challenging everyone to make one small change a month from now until Earth Day. What small changes have you made?

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5 comments :

Lisa said...

We switched to a reusable filter a few months ago. Will end up saving us a lot of money and waste. :)

Kristin - The Goat said...

Well, for my rental condos I just purchased a case of filters that will last a little less than a year for $136.89 ! Ouch. I had no idea there were such things as electrostatic filters. I'll have to look into it for our personal condo. That's a great idea. I'd of course buy two filters so I could wash the one lol but that's just me. I'm nutty like that.

Kim Moldofsky said...

Interesting. I'm not sure I would trust it to do as good of a job, but it's something to think about in the future.

Lisa Nelsen-Woods said...

Hi Kim!

As long a you clean/vacuum the filters they work just as well as the disposable filters. Actually that's one of the reasons my husband bought the reusable filter - it's one of those super duper allergy filtering filters because I have pollen allergies.

gyen said...

If you're willing to spend a little more, you can buy a disposable filter that you ONLY use while your reusable one is drying from being washed. Since it would only be used for a day, you can get years of use out of that disposable one. I feel like washing them gets them cleaner than vacuuming, but maybe that's just me!

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