There Are Thousands of Air Filters in Boston Nobody Thinks About Until Something Goes Wrong.

Walk through Boston on a Tuesday morning.

Thousands of people are arriving at work. Hospitals are already busy. Laboratories are running. Students are filling classrooms. Hotels are turning over rooms. Restaurants are preparing for lunch.

And somewhere above the ceiling, behind a mechanical-room door, on a rooftop, or deep inside an air-handling unit, there is an air filter doing a remarkably unremarkable job.

Nobody sees it.

Nobody talks about it.

Nobody walks into a building and says, "Great filtration today."

That's exactly how it's supposed to work.

The Invisible Part of a Building

Commercial buildings are full of equipment most people never see.

Air filters may be among the least glamorous pieces of it.

They're usually cardboard, metal, synthetic media, fiberglass, or some combination of materials engineered into a product that eventually gets dirty and gets thrown away.

But consider where they're working.

Inside the hospitals caring for our families.

Inside the laboratories developing new medicines and technologies.

Inside the universities educating thousands of students.

Inside office towers filled with people eight or ten hours a day.

Inside hotels, manufacturing plants, schools, data centers, government buildings and apartment communities.

Different buildings.

Different systems.

Different filtration requirements.

But almost all of them have something in common:

Air has to move through the building.

And somewhere along the way, we're going to filter it.

Boston Makes That More Interesting

Boston isn't an easy environment to generalize.

Within a relatively small geographic area, you can go from a historic building that's been standing for more than a century to one of the most sophisticated laboratory buildings in the world.

You can have a university campus next to a hospital complex, next to an office tower, next to active construction.

The HVAC systems behind those buildings can be just as different.

Some use common commercial filters.

Others require multiple stages of filtration.

Some applications require HEPA filtration.

Others use carbon or other specialty media.

And then there are buildings where someone opens a mechanical room and discovers an air handler requiring a filter size that seemingly exists nowhere else on Earth.

We know those well.

Most People Will Never See Any of It

That's the interesting thing about our industry.

The finished product is largely invisible.

A beautiful building can have hundreds—or thousands—of filters working throughout it, and almost nobody occupying that building will ever see one.

They shouldn't have to.

Facilities teams, building engineers, HVAC contractors and maintenance professionals handle that world behind the scenes.

Filters arrive at receiving docks.

Cases get separated by size.

They move into mechanical rooms.

Old filters come out.

New filters go in.

Then the doors close.

And everyone else goes back to work.

Until Something Goes Wrong.

Then the invisible becomes very visible.

A filter doesn't fit.

An air handler needs an unusual size nobody has in stock.

A shipment is late.

A specification changed.

A construction project creates an unexpected amount of dust.

Filters begin loading differently.

A critical piece of equipment needs filtration now—not next week.

Or somebody realizes that a building with dozens of air handlers has a filter schedule nobody has seriously reviewed in years.

Suddenly, the thing nobody thought about becomes important.

Really important.

And that's usually when our phone rings.

Behind Every Filter Is a Much Bigger Operation

This is the part of commercial filtration most people never think about.

Supplying a large building isn't simply putting filters into boxes.

Someone has to know what belongs in that building.

Someone has to manufacture or source it.

Someone has to make sure a 19¾-inch filter doesn't accidentally become a 20-inch problem.

Someone has to keep track of dozens—or sometimes hundreds—of different sizes and configurations.

Someone has to get them to the building.

And then a facility team has to get the right filter to the right piece of equipment.

Do that across multiple buildings, campuses or hundreds of properties and air filtration becomes less like buying a commodity and more like managing a small supply chain hiding inside your HVAC system.

Somewhere in New Hampshire, We're Thinking About Those Filters.

At Airex Filter Corporation in Hudson, New Hampshire, air filters aren't particularly invisible.

They're everywhere.

They're being manufactured.

They're stacked in inventory.

They're being loaded onto trucks.

They're being measured, quoted, labeled and delivered.

There are standard sizes.

There are custom sizes.

There are filters headed for hospitals, schools, laboratories, commercial buildings, manufacturing facilities and countless other applications throughout New England.

It's what we've done for more than 50 years.

And after doing it for that long, you start looking at buildings a little differently.

Drive through Boston and we don't just see the skyline.

We see mechanical rooms.

Rooftop units.

Air handlers.

Filter banks.

Loading docks.

And a tremendous amount of filtration quietly working behind the scenes.

Good commercial air filtration isn't supposed to be exciting.

It shouldn't interrupt anyone's day.

The people inside the building shouldn't have to think about whether the correct filters arrived, whether they fit, where they were manufactured or how they got into the mechanical room.

They have other things to do.

The best outcome is remarkably simple:

The right filter. In the right place. At the right time.

Then the mechanical-room door closes.

The building keeps running.

Boston keeps moving.

And thousands of air filters go back to being something almost nobody thinks about.

Exactly as they should be.

Airex Filter Corporation Commercial Air Filtration • Manufactured in New Hampshire • Serving New England for More Than 50 Years

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