By Jay the Nomad – Field Notes from the Frontlines
Ever tried wrapping your head around a micron? It’s like measuring a raindrop with a football field. But to truly grasp what’s floating in your home — or nesting — we need to shrink ourselves down and walk through the wild world of indoor particles.
Let’s line them up. From the chunky to the downright invisible:
The Big Boys (Visible to the Eye)
Bed Bugs – 4 to 5 mm long
➡️ About the size of an apple seed or a sesame seed stuck to your mattress seam.
Dust Mites – 0.2 to 0.3 mm
➡️ Imagine a dust mite the size of a grain of salt. You can barely spot one, but your skin cells are their buffet.
The Mid-Sizers (Barely Visible to the Trained Eye)
Mold Spores – 3 to 40 microns
➡️ That’s like lining up 25 mold spores across a human hair. If a human hair were the width of a HDB corridor, a mold spore is like a speck of dust stuck to the railing.
Pollen – 10 to 100 microns
➡️ One pollen grain is like a volleyball in the lungs. That big.
Pet Dander – 2.5 to 10 microns
➡️ Imagine a dog sneezing glitter — you’ll never get it all out of your carpet.
The Microscopic Misfits (Invisible, But Mighty)
PM10 (Particulate Matter under 10 microns)
➡️ These guys are small enough to sneak into your nose and settle in your upper airway. Think: a red ant crawling into your nostril. Gross.
PM2.5 – under 2.5 microns
➡️ 30x smaller than a strand of hair. They go deeper — into bronchioles of your lungs. Like cigarette smoke invading the lounge.
Bacteria – ~0.3 to 2 microns
➡️ Tiny enough to squeeze past your bodyguards. If your lung’s airways were MRT tunnels, bacteria are reckless motorcyclists zipping through the gaps.
Viruses – 0.02 to 0.3 microns
➡️ Tinier than tiny. If Marina Bay Sands were a nose, a virus would be a flea hopping through the lobby — unseen, but causing chaos.
Compare It:
| Particle / Pest | Approx. Size | Compared To… |
|---|---|---|
| Bed Bug (adult) | 4–5 mm | A watermelon seed |
| Bed Bug Limbs (detached) | ~1–2 mm | An ant’s leg or a grain of rice |
| Dust Mite (adult) | 250–350 microns | A fine grain of sand |
| Dust Mite Feces | 10–40 microns | 1/10 the width of a human hair |
| Dust Mite Egg | ~100 microns | A speck of dust under a fingernail |
| Mold Spore | 3–40 microns | Pollen-size, invisible to naked eye |
| Bug Feces (General) | 5–50 microns | Like black pepper dust you never ordered |
| Bug Egg (General) | 70–200 microns | Smaller than a salt grain — but stickier |
| Bug Limbs (Broken Bits) | 50–500 microns | Microscopic chopsticks you don’t want in bed |
| Pet Dander / Skin Flakes | 0.5–10 microns | Slips through nose hairs like ninjas |
| Bacteria | 0.3–2 microns | Like stacking 400 of them across a hair strand |
| PM10 (Particulate Matter) | 10 microns | Filters through standard face masks |
| PM2.5 | 2.5 microns | Enters deep into lungs — beyond cilia’s reach |
| Smoke, Soot, Combustion Residue | 0.01–1 micron | Lodges into alveoli — your lungs’ last line |
So What?
Size matters. Bigger bugs trigger reactions. Tiny ones? They infiltrate silently. The worst? You breathe them in, and they party where you can’t scrub: deep in your lungs, your AC coils, your child’s pillow.
SmartClean tackles the spectrum — from mite to microbe. It’s not about just what you see… but what you don’t.
Book a clean that actually goes deep
Jay the Nomad documents homes across Singapore — from glitzy condos to dusty attics — chasing down the unseen villains we live with every day.
