What the HEPA?

Everybody knows that if your air purifier doesn’t have a HEPA filter then you might as well go breathe whatever comes out of a stray dog’s butt. And just like everyone agrees that HEPA is the alpha and the omega of air filtration, almost nobody knows what “HEPA” actually means.

Is it a term for a specific kind of filtration technology? A brand name perhaps? Maybe an important international standard like “KN95” or Supersize McRib.”

As is often the case, to answer that question we must look back in time 2,500 years or so, to the ancient Greeks. They actually referred to themselves as the middle-aged Greeks back then.

Either way, the best way to get your head around that time period is to watch 1990s shows like Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess because those were tasteful ripoffs of Roman mythology which was itself a tasteful ripoff of Greek mythology. What young Kevin Sorbo and/or young Lucy Lawless will tell you, provided you’re able to get that old TiVo in the basement to boot up, is that there was once a goddess named Hepa who was responsible for sorting the spirits of the dead into various groups headed to Hades or the underworld or whatever.

Full disclosure: none of this is being fact-checked because our internal IT thought police blocked access to Wikipedia last month. [Note: You spent a full work week in an edit war about whether the salad dressing was named after Julius Caesar or Caesar Cardini. — Editor]

So it is our wikiless recollection that the lovely Hepa separated the spiritual wheat from the chaff in such a way that thousands of years later she would still be known as the goddess of filtration and purification. Out of respect, her name is now fully capitalized, so that no single letter will be lost through her fine fabric pores. [Okay fine, you can have Wikipedia back but we’re removing all the salad dressing from the cafeteria. — Ed.]

Holy shit, is Ed short for Edward? [It’s short for editor, you jackass. How did you even get access to this file again?]

ANYWHO…the real message here is that if you’re going to bother trying to get all of the potentially toxic poison out of the surrounding air, you better believe you want something with HEPA filtration. The only downside is that this kind of thing can get really pricy, which is why we’re hooking you up with a certified renewed one for way less than retail.

These were presumably returned or something. Maybe the original buyers decided they didn’t want to breathe clean air after all? We’ll never know. But either way we’re passing the savings on to you.