It was kind of a chilly late autumn here in Buenos Aires as I wrote this, 2008-04-19; but, because of this [rather remarkable environmental phenomenon](http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/individual.php?db_date=2008-04-18 MODIS image of the fires and smoke), I had the air conditioner turned on full blast. This is apparently the best we can do at avoiding the smoke that blankets the city, and I thought I should document the crazy scheme I was using, since it seemed to work. The Crazy Scheme ---------------- I heated the house a lot using the water heater; like many Argentine houses, we have one of those wonderful tankless water heaters, which can provide an unlimited supply of scalding hot water unless they catch on fire or melt or something. (Don't laugh; our friends Kevin and Alicia's caught on fire several times.) So I ran the shower very slowly to fill up the jacuzzi tub (we have a jacuzzi tub, you see), then started the bubble jets running to transfer more of the heat into the air, while using a fan to vent the hot, humid air from the bathroom to the rest of the house, to give the air conditioner more heat to chew on. (Unlike, say, the stove, the hot water heater is properly vented to outside, with a little horizontal metal chimney. And it has a hell of a gas burner inside.) I ran the air conditioner because it does remove some of the smoke from the air, but it's driven by a thermostat, so it would stop running if the air cooled off. So that's why I used the hot water heater to heat up the house. It turns out that the hot shower and the jacuzzi bubble jets also remove smoke from the air. There was quite a bit of smoke deposited around the edge of the bathtub now from the bubbles. Photos will be forthcoming eventually if I didn't lose them all. The humidity added to the air also ameliorated the eye and bronchial irritation from the smoke. Fine-Tuning ----------- I added a little shampoo to the water in order to make it pick up smoke particles and transfer heat better. (Smaller bubbles, less spherical bubbles, and less tendency for the water to repel smoky oil particles.) Unfortunately, jacuzzis being jacuzzis, this resulted in a huge mass of bubbles growing from the water and threatening to swamp the bathroom. So I added a little conditioner, and the bubbles died back down. In general, the surfactant action I was looking for and the foaming action I got are not inseparable. I wonder if I could get better results with dishwasher detergent, for example (although ideally without bleach), industrial degreasers, or some simple combination like Calblend plus simethicone. The placement of the fan in the bathroom door proved important. Ideal would be a fan at the other end of a long duct, either blowing cool, dry air into the bathroom, or sucking hot, wet air out of the top of the bathroom. What seemed to work best with the fan I have was blowing hot, wet air out of the bathroom and into the bedroom, where the air conditioner is. This produced a certain amount of fog. Real Air Filtration ------------------- I was hoping to try to get a HEPA filtration system for the house. I knew it would't be easy, because there aren't many stores here that sell them, and due to the smoke, even the stores that carry them seemed to be out. So we made do with N95 respirators, which I bought at a pharmacy that evening after hunting for hours for something better. We spent a lot of yesterday and this morning with wet bandannas around our faces, inside the house. I have a headband that I used to secure the bottom of the bandanna against my chin, and I rolled up strips of paper towel to put on each side of my nose to block the spaces there. That seemed to provide some noticeable protection. I picked up some deionized water at Carrefour that evening; I figured it might work better for air filtration than tap water. I'm not sure whether it did or not. I wish I had some way of measuring the smoke, other than by counting how often I cough, because I'd like to know (for example) whether the N95 respirators work better than the bandannas, or even whether they're effective at all against smoke.
