I’m in New Brunswick, Canada. We had fires to the east (In Nova Scotia) and to the west (Quebec), but have been lucky enough not to get any of the smoke. We did get quite a bit of rain for the past week though!
I'm in Ottawa Ontario.
Wednesday morning my AQI was reading 142 in my basement with the windows closed (normally it's 1 or 2).
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Those are some nasty levels. Really unhealthy. We had thick orange air here on Vancouver Island last year from the Washington fires, just when my father in-law with COPD was visiting. Closing the house and running a portable HEPA helped tremendously to bring the PM 2.5 to safe levels, really fast.
I think people spend a bit too much on fancy air cleaners. Mine is not anything special. It’s just a Honeywell air filter. A large HEPA filter with a charcoal outer filter and fan. Not connected and not automated, just a filter. I would get something going. It’s not good for you to breathe that.
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Drove from near the Cape in Massachusetts to Virginia today (9th). According to the EPA's air now app we were mostly green with a some yellow the entire way. So much better than yesterday and the day before.
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Exactly. Thanks for posting. Confirms that the “dumb” air filter I have is the preferred choice. No need to get fancy to breathe cleaner air. 
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Walking the 30 feet from the house to the car to drive to work was nasty.
I actually held my breath walking from my car to the entrance of the building I work in (my N95 masks were conveniently in the hallway at home 
).
They are predicting a return of the smoke overnight and tomorrow, but not as bad as it was on Wednesday.
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Don't know a ton about this, but I thought the desired target was 2.5 microns? The write up says:
- "0.3 microns and larger"
Feedback appreciated. 
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You can capture well below that with HEPA
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Thanks...so sounds like you're saying that their write-up is incorrect, then, when they say 3 microns?
Oh fun, another black hole of stuff that I'm going to need to read up on. 
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Essentially any HEPA should do the job. The efficiency claims is where there’s a lot of gray area for consumers. Honeywell has been at this for a long time, so I tend to think you’re going to get the truth from them.
I can tell you that my Qingping Pro air quality meter showed me that my HEPA filter that is now about 20 years old still works very well. I have had the unit for about 30 years, and it has only received 1 new HEPA after 10 years, and a new charcoal filter 3 years ago.
Last year, in a panic at my father in-law visiting us while we had such bad air from the fires, I pulled it out of the garage (still packed up from the move) and vacuumed the drywall dust off the carbon filter, and blew the remaining of it out with compressed air. I had been using it to filter the air for the guys that were working their butts off, renovating our basement before we sold the house. Those crazy guys were breathing that stuff in with no masks. Only one guy had an N95 respirator on.
Had I not had the Qingping Pro to show me it was actually working to very effectively reduce the smoke to almost normal levels, I probably would’ve rushed out to try to find a new air cleaner, thinking this one was too old and inefficient, or needed another HEPA filter replacement. I probably never needed to replace that first one.
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I mean Sebastian probably caused all this..
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We need the Mounties to take his hibachi away from him.
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Maybe I had my smoker on too high? 
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Wood smoked brisket?
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I'm really odd in that I hate high levels of white noise (the kind of noise that air purifiers put out).
However, I still like their benefits so I picked up a few of the Levoit smart units. They hook into Home Assistant pretty easily (HACS) and I can control them based on the occupancy of the room they're in.
Occupied - Low Fan
Empty - Crank it up!
I also have one next to the cats' litter robot (also tied into Home Assistant) so when they enter to do their business, it triggers the fan to high and back to low after 15 minutes. This does a good job of keeping litter dust out of the air with the added benefit of the charcoal filter easing some of the odors (not all unfortunately).
Does a pretty good job of keeping PM 2.5 down (currently 38 µg/m³ outside where I live).
