How to Choose Furnace Air Filters

How to Choose Furnace Air Filters When it comes to furnace air filters you can choose between extremely cheap brands and very high-end expensive brands, depending on how much work you want the filters to do.

You can get the most inexpensive filters that are usually just a very loosely woven fiberglass mesh for as little as one or two dollars each. Other types of furnace air filters can cost $20 or more, while still others can cost hundreds of dollars because they’re designed for very specific purposes and are considered permanent rather than disposable. If you don’t suffer from any type of allergies, you don’t have pets and you don’t have a lot of dust or mold to deal with in your home, you may not want to spend a lot of money on a high-end air filter. The more expensive the filter, the more likely it is to filter out those types of things as well as things like viruses and bacteria. But if you don’t anticipate a need for something like this and you don’t have allergy problems, then an inexpensive filter may be fine. In this case, you’d be purchasing a filter just to keep the dirt and dust out of your furnace coil and to remove the larger particles before they go through your duct work and are blown back into your home.

Choosing a pleated filter over a flat one will ensure that you get more filtering action out of it because there’s a larger surface area. If you do choose a higher-end filter, a pleated one is also the best type because it offers more opportunities for all of the allergens and mold spores to be caught on the larger surface area. You may need to check and change it more often because the larger area means more will be caught and it’s liable to fill up faster and get clogged. Regularly changing and/or cleaning it, if that’s an option, will make a huge difference in the condition of your furnace and your home’s air.

The MERV rating of a furnace filter tells you just how well it works and how large the particles are that it can pull out of the air. MERV stands for Minimum Efficiency Rating Value, with the lower numbers meaning less filtration and higher numbers meeting maximum air scrubbing qualities. A MERV rating of 12 is just about the highest you should consider for a home HVAC system. Most very inexpensive fiberglass filters have a rating between one and four, though that rating isn’t usually printed on the package, and are designed only to catch very large particles of dust and dirt to protect the furnace system.