Quality of air is just one of several factors that contribute to a healthy home or work environment. Pollutants, carbon emissions, and VOCs (volatile organic compounds) in the air pose a hazard to health and the environment. For the past five years, Peter Mann, CEO of Alen Corporation, a portable air purifier manufacturer based in Austin, TX, has been creating indoor air-quality products that can make us all breath a little easier.
Is it true that you were first inspired to manufacture air purifiers by the asthma attacks that your son was suffering from?
That wasn’t when I began, but that was the driving force behind our company’s formation. I was always looking for a noninvasive way to treat the asthma attacks because the medicine and steroids that he was on as a baby made him violently ill. I wanted to improve his air quality and get rid of the asthma triggers, allowing at the same time, a chance to wean him off the medicines that terribly stressed his body.
When did you start Alen Corp., and what goals did you have in mind?
We began in 2003 with the air purifiers. At the time, Sharper Image was also selling [its] version of a purifier, and that greatly helped to create the marketplace. We performed extensive research, first sourcing some products overseas, and then we moved into manufacturing our own products. We saw many weaknesses with the current purification systems, namely that they really weren’t for health-conscious people who had allergies, asthma, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), or other respiratory-type ailments. We wanted to provide a portable, noninvasive, and nontoxic way to filter indoor air and provide a health benefit.
What makes a purifier effective in improving the quality of air? And how does yours stack up?
Two factors figure into the effectiveness rating of an air purifier—the volume of air it can move and the particles that get removed with each pass through the filter. If you have a smaller sized room, our portable air purifiers alone could do the job. If you’re in a much larger square footage area, then it may take a combination of these portable HEPA air purifiers and home air filters to give you the optimal air quality. HEPA is recognized as the highest technology for filtration and is used in our newest product, the eco-friendly Paralda. Test results using a UV-lamp, such as that found in Paralda, show how effective the lamp is against airborne bacteria. Alen Corp. also offers different models of purifiers that have a different technology that’s effective in removing VOCs that could be off-gas from your carpet or emissions from your printer.
What kind of trends is Alen Corp. currently moving toward?
Paralda is the first HEPA UV air purifier that we’ve offered that is green; it’s Energy Star qualified and RoHS (reduction of hazardous substances) compliant. RoHS is not a requirement in the U.S., but it’s this type of green higher standard that we’re trying to hold ourselves to, continually. We put numerous green elements in the new Paralda product. In fact, it uses less energy than a standard light bulb, while having 99.97 percent air-cleaning efficiency. The Paralda sets a new green category standard in air purification, and that’s our direction in going forward with all our products.
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