A Note from the CEO: The fire is contained in a week. The gas stays for months.

Thank you to everyone who joined me live last week. The comments moved faster than I could read them, and the questions were sharp. Several of you asked me to put the science in writing. Here it is.

I want to teach you something today rather than sell you something. If you finish this letter and never buy a thing from us, I’ll still consider it time well spent.

Let’s start with what everyone is covering.
You’ve seen the photographs. Orange skies over Minnesota. Hazed skylines in New York. 900 fires burning at once in Canada.¹ 700 structures lost around Spokane, with 65,000 people evacuated inside city limits.²

On July 16, Duluth, Minnesota recorded a reading of 934.³ Here’s the part worth understanding. The air quality index only runs from zero to 500. That top band, 301 to 500, is called Hazardous. Duluth went so far past the end of the scale that the EPA has a separate term for where they landed. They call it Beyond the AQI.⁴ Duluth is a city that has spent years marketing itself as a climate haven.

Now here’s what almost nobody is covering.
Every one of those measurements is a particle measurement. PM2.5. Soot. The visible part.

Smoke is not only particles. Smoke is also gas, and the gas travels farther, lasts longer, and passes through nearly everything people buy to stop it.

A short chemistry lesson.
Burning vegetation releases a predictable set of volatile organic compounds. Formaldehyde. Benzene. Acrolein, which is the compound responsible for that stinging feeling in your eyes and throat. 1,3 butadiene. Acetaldehyde. Toluene. Xylenes. Naphthalene. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classifies formaldehyde, benzene, and 1,3 butadiene as Group 1 carcinogens, their highest category.⁵

Then there’s the part specific to this season. Missoula Public Health issued a notice on August 3 explaining that smoke from the Spokane fires would carry a more complex mixture of harmful pollutants, because it was burning through man-made materials.⁶

When homes burn, the smoke stops being a wood fire and becomes a chemical fire. Vinyl siding and PVC pipe release vinyl chloride. Foam furniture and carpet padding release hydrogen cyanide and isocyanates. Insulation and packaging release styrene. Whatever was sitting in the garage releases whatever it was made of.

Spokane is the second largest city in Washington. That plume is not a campfire.

What these compounds actually do to people.
This is the part of the story I want you to sit with, because it explains something most people notice and cannot name.

Start with acrolein, since it is the one you have felt without knowing its name. It is what makes smoke sting. EPA’s own hazard summary describes long term inhalation exposure in humans as producing general respiratory congestion along with eye, nose, and throat irritation. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) classifies respiratory effects as a presumed health effect in humans, with nasal and throat irritation setting in at low exposure levels, accompanied by a measurable drop in breathing rate.⁷

Here is how seriously the federal government takes that one compound. In EPA’s reporting on children’s environmental health, when children lived in areas exceeding the benchmark for non-cancer health effects from hazardous air pollutants, acrolein was responsible in almost every case.⁸

Formaldehyde irritates eyes, nose, and throat at concentrations well below what most people would consider remarkable, and IARC places it in Group 1, its highest carcinogen classification. Benzene sits in Group 1 as well. EPA set its reference concentration for benzene on the basis of blood related effects in humans, and ATSDR documents central nervous system effects following acute inhalation, including drowsiness, dizziness, and headache.⁹

Scratchy throat. Burning eyes. A headache that will not lift. Fatigue by midafternoon. Trouble holding a thought. People describe these to me constantly during smoke weeks, usually while apologizing for not having a better explanation.

The explanation is chemistry. You are breathing irritants at concentrations your body registers and your instruments do not.

Not everyone carries this the same way. Children breathe considerably more air relative to their body weight than adults do, which means the same room delivers a larger dose to a smaller person. Older adults, people who are pregnant, and anyone managing asthma or a chronic respiratory condition sit in the same category.

I want to be careful here, because overstatement is how this industry lost its credibility. Dose and duration matter enormously. One smoky afternoon is not a diagnosis. Weeks of elevated exposure inside a closed house, during a season that now arrives every year, is a genuinely different question, and it is the question almost nobody is asking.

Your nose is not an instrument.
One more thing worth knowing. Olfactory fatigue sets in within minutes. Your sense of smell adapts to a constant odor and stops reporting it, which is why the smell of smoke seems to fade in a room where nothing has actually changed.

Absence of smell is not absence of exposure. It usually just means you have been there a while.

Why filters don’t stop gases.
A filter is a net, and a net works by size. Gas has no size. Formaldehyde, benzene, and acrolein pass through filter media the way wind passes through a screen door. That is not a knock on HEPA. HEPA is the right tool for particulate, and we make no particle claim at WellisAir. We never have. It simply is not built for this half of the problem.

The usual answer for gases is activated carbon, and carbon does adsorb them for a while. Under real household conditions carbon saturates in a matter of weeks, and a saturated filter can begin releasing what it previously captured back into the room. Most people don’t replace them anywhere near often enough. That comes from the EPA, the American Lung Association, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.¹⁰

Which leaves most households sitting inside an invisible exposure with nothing running against it.

What WellisAir does instead.
Outdoors, sunlight and water vapor produce hydroxyls, which break the chemical bonds of airborne compounds continuously. It’s the reason outdoor air cleans itself. WellisAir replicates that chemistry indoors.

We don’t capture. We convert.

In chamber testing conducted by UPC-CRESCA, report number 20190930, our technology delivered roughly 94 percent reduction in volatile organic compounds against an untreated control at 30 minutes! On formaldehyde specifically, that same study measured roughly 93 percent.¹¹

You’ll notice I gave you the lab and the report number. I’ll never quote you a percentage without them, because a number without a source is just marketing.

The part that matters after the news cycle ends.
Coverage of this stops the day the skies turn blue. The chemistry doesn’t.

Those compounds settle into drywall, carpet, upholstery, curtains, and your HVAC system. Semi volatile compounds in particular re release slowly into the air for weeks and months afterward. The smoke event ends. The exposure continues, quietly, at a level nobody is measuring because the news trucks have gone home.

That’s the window we care about.

Five things you can do this week, regardless of what you own.

1 Keep windows closed and set your HVAC to recirculate during active smoke.

2 Change your furnace or air handler filter after the event, not during. It’s carrying the load right now.

3 Stop adding gases indoors. Skip aerosols, scented candles, and solvent based cleaners during a smoke event. You’re stacking on top of what is already in there.

4 Wipe hard surfaces. Settled compounds re release from dust.

5 Wash soft goods when it clears. Curtains, throws, bedding, pet beds. Textiles hold this.None of those five require buying anything from us.

If you already own a WellisAir unit.

Watch the color indicator this month. Red means it’s detecting compounds in the air. Blue means the air has cleared. During a smoke event you’ll likely see red where you never have before, including in rooms with the windows shut all week. That shift is the whole argument, and it’s happening in your house right now.

The cartridge is the fuel and the hydroxyl generator is the engine, and a depleted cartridge in a smoke month is a wasted month. A swap takes under 10 seconds.

If you’re traveling out of a smoke zone, pull the cartridge, seal it with the original screw cap, leave the oversized box at home, and pack the unit wrapped in a towel in the center of your checked bag. I fly this way constantly.

To everyone in Spokane, in Missoula, across Minnesota and Ontario and the Northwest, we’re thinking about you. Homes are being lost. That’s not a marketing moment and I won’t treat it as one.

Learn something today. Protect your household. Ask me hard questions on the next live.