My daughter has cystic fibrosis. When she was diagnosed at just six-days-old, I immediately began looking for advice from other parents of children with CF. They were quick to offer insight, and I was just as quick to take it. It was unsettling to me when one mother told me that hotels were always out of the question because her child would struggle to breath. All of their vacations became camping trips. Camping is fun, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes (okay most of the time) I want the comfort of a real bed and a real bathroom while vacationing and I don’t want to lug an air purifier along with us. Luckily, an innovative company is taking care of the air quality in hotel rooms for me and giving me one less thing to worry about while traveling. I recently spoke with Brain Brault, CEO of Pure Room, and he described the company’s patented seven-step process to creating healthy hotel rooms.
Steps One and Two
“The first thing we focus on when we enter a room is the air handling system,” explains Brault, “the mechanical parts, fan, coils, the drip pan, and the duct work between coils and the vent. Condensation forms on the coils so you’ve got an area that has picked up contaminants in the air, which adhere to it, and you basically have a dark, stale, moist environment. We deep clean and disinfect, and use coil treatments to keep condensation from building up. Plus we add a tea tree oil cartridge in the unit and an enzyme tablet is added to the drip pan to keep bacteria from growing.”
Steps Three and Four
After the air unit is cleaned, the surfaces of the room are disinfected. Then the room is sealed and shocked with ozone for two hours. This is the only time ozone is ever introduced to the room. If you are like me, the thought of introducing ozone to the room just made you tense up. Brault assured me that after the room is treated with ozone (a two-hour process), the room sits for 45 minutes while air-monitoring equipment assesses the air. Within 38 minutes, there is no readable ozone in the room. And while this process kills any remaining bacteria and viruses in the room, Pure Room is looking towards a new treatment that will be just as effective without having to use ozone.
Step Five
“Now the room is sanitary,” says Brault, “and we want to keep it that way for an extended period of time. We address the surfaces with Pure Shield, a bacterial static barrier applied with electrostatic sprayer.” This barrier bonds with everything it touches, according to Brault, right down to the individual carpet fibers. Bacteria can’t adhere to the surfaces so they are therefore deprived of a food source and will die. This shield lasts for over two years.
Steps Six and Seven
Next, the company’s technicians install a class II medical device air purifier. It circulates every 12-15 minutes and includes a prefilter for dust, a 1 ½ inch carbon vent which pulls vapors and odors out of the air, a hepa like filtration chamber, and an electronic shield that kills 98-100% of viruses and 94-100% of mold. There is no ionization involved. In addition, mattresses and pillows are placed in hypoallergenic encasements ensuring that dust musts don’t get through.
Every six months, technicians return to the room to perform portions of this process and to take particle readings. They sanitize, change filters, change the tea tree oil and the enzyme tablet, and do a visual inspection of the room. They check for new furniture, bedding, curtains and other new items in order to clean and treat them.
The final result speaks for itself. According to testing by Pure Room, the particle counts in a Pure Room are 1/10th of that in a regular hotel room, and 12 times cleaner than outside air. Pure Rooms are popping up across the United States and around the world and the company expects to have close to 400 locations by the end of 2011. Today, you can find a Pure Room as far as Scandinavia and there will soon be Pure Rooms available in Ireland, India, Taiwan and Australia too. A variety of hotel chains have teamed with Pure Room, but most Hyatt brand hotels have this feature. Some hotels charge an extra fee for the Pure Rooms they offer, but I would pay it in a second to protect not just my daughter’s lungs, but the rest of my family’s as well.
Pure Room is changing the rules of travel for those of us living with CF, asthma, allergies, and other respiratory conditions. If you are planning to travel soon, just go to their website and use the search box on the left side of the page to search for a Pure Room in your destination.