El Carmen is a neighborhood in the Bella Vista corregimiento, in the Panama district, and it borders El Cangrejo. It groups several sectors, among them Herbruger, Linares, Pasadena and Nuevo Reparto El Carmen, and on Vía España it has a Metro station named after the nearby church.
A neighborhood with several sectors tends to bring together homes, apartment buildings and small offices from different periods, each with equipment of a different age. There the inspection starts with the filter and the unit, because that is where dust is held back before it moves on into the ducts, and Panama’s humid climate makes that dust likely to turn damp. The area is about 3 km by road from the Climatiza office, in an approximate calculation.
Data point: A study of air conditioning cooling coils found that their microbial ecology depended on the outdoor climate through the dew point, and that low-efficiency filters (MERV 8) were associated with a greater abundance of certain groups of bacteria and fungi than MERV 14 (Bakker et al., Indoor Air, 2020).