To vent or not to vent

Our hats are off to those intrepid DIYers who aren’t afraid to McGiver an unattractive mess, sometimes with big holes in walls, for the noble cause of piping litter box odor directly out of one's home. Pinterest and instructables.com are filled with examples.

But before you engage is such escapades do yourself a favor. Call your local utility and ask how much it costs to heat or cool those 30-100 cubic feet of indoor air they blow outdoors each and every minute. Hint: it’s nothing to turn up your nose at.

Let’s do some easy math. Take a home that is 2400 square feet. Multiply that by a standard eight-foot tall ceiling. This yields 19,200 cubic feet. If we use a fan rated at 50 cubic feet of air flow per minute (CFM), times 1440 minutes in a day, we have 72,000 cubic feet – 3.75 times the volume of the home – that is being blown out the window each and every day. Annually, that's 1,369 housefuls of air.

Here, in the suburbs of Seattle, where natural gas is supplied by Puget Sound Energy (PSE).  For purposes of calculation, we will assume a year-round average of heating the house 20 degrees F higher than the outside temperature. With help from our friends at PSE, we have calculated the annual cost of those 1,369 housefuls of air heated to 20 degrees higher than the outside air at $139.74.*  

Unless it is your intent to heat or cool your neighborhood, there’s a vastly less expensive and more environmentally friendly way. The Purrified Air Litter Box Air Filter cleans that same 50 CFM (53 actually, but we want to keep the math simple) of litter box odor, along with other household odor and particles that comes its way, such as smoke, cooking odor, cleaning chemicals, harmful Volatile Organic Chemicals, microorganisms, bacteria, virus, dust, pet dander, mold and mildew. And every single cubic foot stays in your home. 

The filter draws one third of an amp. This means that if you leave the filter on 24-7-12-365 and you pay twelve cents per kilowatt hour for your electricity, it will cost you about $4.15 per year in electricity and approximately $80 per year in filter media. 

In case you live in some other size home and have some other fan CFM rating, some perspective:

 * Here is the formula provided by PSE to calculate the cost of raising the temperature in a home heated with natural gas:

Thank you for reaching out to PSE's Energy Advisor team. You can calculate the rough cost of changing the temperature in your home by utilizing Q = mcΔT. 

• Q: is the energy required in BTU's. 

• m: is the mass of the air in the room in lbs

   

• c: is the specific heat capacity of air (approximately 0.24 BTU/lb/°F)

   

• ΔT: is the desired temperature change (10°F in this case)