Who We Are
CleanAirKits is a family business operating from the Missouri river town our grandfathers supplied with electricity and ice in the 1920-1940s. We combine American-made enclosures with industry-leading CoolerMaster PC fans. We grew up excited by MacGyver and weekend trips with dad to junkyards and Radio Shack. We've created complex world-changing technologies, but we're thrilled to deep dive on scrappy techniques to defeat nasty airborne pathogens. Most of all, we've seen long-term disability in our families first hand, and are dedicated to building multiple layers of protection that slow the advance of debilitating diseases like measles, strep, TB and Long COVID. We aim to economically double or triple indoor air change rates to noticeably improve health for your home, school, and office.
Clean Air Kits formed out of an online community of a dozen engineers worldwide riffing on rgb-fans paired with less stringent filters in summer 2022. As mask mandates were dropped, we obsessed on the potential of our kids' classrooms to be as safe as outdoors. If only indoor air cleaning could be quiet, cheap & efficient enough!
Partner Rob Wissmann meticulously built a CADR lab in his basement to quantify how well the PC fans were pulling through MERV13 filters. To his delight and surprise, he discovered large advantages in noise and energy efficiency over equivalent-CADR retail HEPA purifiers. Partner Wayne Westerman, PhD, a National Academy of Inventors fellow with three decades of experience in startups, tech and product design, curated this fledgling breakthrough into compact, quiet at one-speed, snap-together kits. Partner Scott Westerman, a four-decade master machinist, formed a kit packaging and assembly operation amongst Wellington, MO cousins and neighbors.
CleanAirKits uniquely straddles the space between homebrew DIY and mass-manufacturing. Our designs stick to simple, replaceable parts and maker fabrication techniques available worldwide. Our Twitter account highlights the latest homebuilt designs, and our published articles guide the DIY community toward optimal fan and filter combinations.
CleanAirKits brought legitimacy to the DIY air cleaner movement by funding the first official Intertek CADR testing of MERV13 Corsi-Rosenthal boxes, and first UL507 Electrical Safety certification for PC fan purifiers. (See FAQ for testing and certification results!) We are grateful to Jim Rosenthal for his global leadership and kind advice setting up the business, and we donate a portion of sales to the Corsi-Rosenthal Foundation that brings clean indoor air to disadvantaged communities.