Achim from AirGradient here. Nice to see my blog post getting some attention.
I think the underlying picture here really is that I and my co-founder are both heavily affected by air pollution in Northern Thailand and are seeing how it affects the health of thousands of people.
We believe strongly that air quality monitoring should be affordable so that people from poorer regions and countries can afford air quality monitoring and thus protect their health by knowing when the air quality turns bad. This is one of the reasons why we open-sourced our air quality designs [1] and are working with many NGOs and Universities to bring accurate low-cost air quality monitoring to underserved communities around the world.
Since we are a self-funded company we do not have pressure to maximize profit but can work under the mantra "Impact first (and profit will follow if we do a good job)."
By the way, if you work in air quality research, we are currently running a global co-location test program and are interested in additional partners [2].
Hello. I would love to buy your products. However, I am stopped by the fact that I have to enter email and agree to terms before I can even see shipping options and costs.
Please consider making the shopping process easier and more pleasant.
I am in EU and concerned that it might not be feasible for me to order your products due to high import fees, tax, customs, VAT, etc. that I would probably need to handle myself. Do you plan on establishing a dealer in EU or a shipping site in EU such that items can be shipped from within EU without customers having to deal with the customs, tax, etc?
Currently we ship all kits from Thailand but setting up some fulfillment in the US and EU could be something we might do in future. Currently most customers do not get charged customs and VAT.
Just want to say - I received mine yesterday. I was expecting it to be held up in customs but it arrived with no hassle whatsoever via the postal service.
I got the presoldered version, kind of expecting it to be 100% assembled, but it was even better that I had to to "plug" the sensors and microcontroller in! It made me feel like I had achieved something myself, and gave an appreciation of how it works :)
The quality of the product looks excellent - inside and out. Although maybe some snap-in transparent plastic in front of the display would protect it from accidental damage? Not that there is any reason to ever touch it, so I guess its not really that important. It certainly doesnt detract from the overall build quality.
A minor niggle on adding the sensor to the online app - i didn't get any feedback that it had added, and when i tried a second time it told me that it was already added. Also, I cant see a way to add/edit places other than creating the one during setup. Probably a few other minor UX niggles I can send an email if desired? But overall it looks great!
I am very interested to see how the air quality changes during the next kiln firings. Thanks!
Thanks for the feedback. We are working on making the onboarding easier and also improve the UI in general. Please get in touch with us if you have more feedback (you can use the support form on our website).
This looks really cool! Could you confirm one thing though, which I can't find on your site after ~5 minutes of searching? Do your PM2.5 sensors truly measure PM2.5 or is it doing an approximation based on factors (many sensors supposedly do this).
If it's the former, it might be useful to make that more clear on your site as I could not confirm it.
Relevant disclaimer: I work for QuantAQ, another distributed Air Quality Monitoring company, my opinions are my own.
With proper calibration, the PMS5003 sensor AirGradient uses is a real and fairly good measurement of PM1 (<1 micron), which is often fairly correlated with (and makes up much of) PM2.5. However, the sensor cannot really see particles larger than 1 micron, which sometimes matters for PM2.5 (when the PM1:PM2.5 ratio changes, like wildfires), and very much matters for PM10. That's why QuantAQ uses a PMS5003 combined with a different sensing technology (an optical particle counter) to actually measure PM2.5 and PM10, not just extrapolate from a PM1 measurement.
I love the work that AirGradient is doing making AQ sensing technology open and accessible, especially to hardware hackers. The BOM cost of the OPC sensor we use alongside the PMS5003 is more than the cost of the entire AirGradient kit, so it is valuable to have options in the market depending on application.
I grew up in Southern California back when it was hard to see the mountains ten miles away on bad days.
I lived in Bangkok for two years. At the worst of the year I still wandered around maskless, thinking "feels like my childhood!" So for me it really didn't seem that bad, but I'm glad people are taking it more seriously now.
I looked into your product, but needed a monitoring solution, not a hobby project. I ended up paying a bit over $1000 for a (more capable) ambient weather solution, which meets the requirements in your blog post (with the possible exception of repairability).
Anyway, I’d have paid about 2x your pre-soldered kit price for a thing that came pre-assembled, with software preloaded, and an idiot proof way to publish the results to local devices and/or cloud services.
I am comfortable with soldering irons, writing embedded software, etc. However, I have plenty of money, but no time. I’m sure you could make large margins off of people like me, and plow it back into additional products.
On a side note, I recently upgraded my airgradient-pro to and esp32 s3 based board (forgot which one but it is pin compatible with the esp8266 it came with).
I got everything to work with ESPHome, except for the BSEC version of the BME680 driver (I added a BME60 because I had one lying around. It worked fine with BSEC and ESPHOME on the ESP8266). I was thinking of sharing my experience, but I never got to it
Looks like a great concept! I found the price relatively high compared to other solutions on the market, aren’t you concerned that you’re touting “affordability” as a selling point?
Comparable products are typically 3x or more the price. A lot of costs are not BOM related, e.g. costs for tooling (e.g. plastic mold), certifications, testing & calibration etc.
I'm genuinely wondering how our nose is not a good enough sensor. Are there common cases that affect large areas like the one you live in, where the pollution is not smellable?
I never could smell the pollution in Bangkok. I don't think people in LA could smell the smog. Certainly when we had wildfire smoke here near Seattle a couple years ago, I could not always smell it. Sometimes when it was heavy, you could smell smoke right when you went outside, but not always... and your nose gets used to it really quickly. But like, that was pollution you could see, the skies were dark and orange. Not really typical pollution levels that people live in every day.
What’s your thought on that air quality monitor released by Amazon? I’d love to see the cost come down even more, but it looks like the most affordable option on the market right now
I agree with the mission of your company and hope you find success, however after reading your website's Privacy Policy regarding the sharing of personal information I don't expect to ever revisit your site.
Thank you for sharing more about AirGradient and its origins. I appreciate the impact-driven mission. I will checkout the details of your co-location program and may have a few sites that would be a good fit.
Thanks for the awesome DIY version of the air quality monitoring solution. Due to this nice guide I already built 3 of the basic sensors and I just purchased one pro to support your cause.
Is there anything good samaritan citizens can do locally (on a standard residential lot) to improve the particulate pollution levels outdoors around their house? (and possibly their neighbors' too?).
What are the effects of trees/plants on PM2.5 pollution? Are there plants that catch more? Do damp leaves catch more?
Does watering plants with a mist pull extra microparticles out of the air vs a stream? (if so, Do plants mind or benefit from the extra stuff in their water?)
Are there any "permaculture" solutions for air filtration? Could a filter caked with pm2.5 black carbon and whatnot be useful for anything else? Can I manufacture a filter that will reduce pm2.5 using home grown plant materials?
What if I converted a wall of my shed into all filtration material, made it airtight, and pushed air out the other side of the shed under solar power? How would 100sqft of filter give flexibility of filter media?
If I made a giant/parallelized bong in my backyard that constantly pulled air through water to try to catch microparticles, how big would it have to be to have an appreciable effect? Would ground charcoal in the water help?
> Is there anything good samaritan citizens can do locally (on a standard residential lot) to improve the particulate pollution levels outdoors around their house? (and possibly their neighbors' too?).
The most important thing is: Don't use any kind of 2-stroke gas engine powered appliances. Leaf blowers, bush trimmers, mowers, cheap electricity generators... they aren't covered by usual emission regulations and thus have barely any exhaust filtering, leading to emission of insane amounts of all kinds of toxins. On top of that they're all very bad for the local ecosystem - mowed grass tends to dry out faster, leaf blowing (or removal in general) kills safe spaces for small lifeforms.
The next major pollutant are all sorts of furnaces and cooking appliances. Be it a wood pellet, gas or oil heating system, a gas stove, or the once-every-weekend BBQ... it all shows up on air quality sensors. Get a heat pump for heating (there are bi-directional air conditioners that can heat in the winter and cool in the summer), take care to not overheat oils in pans (decomposing oils are quite toxic!), and for heavens sake cut back on the BBQs if you value your lungs and those of your neighbours.
Just to put some numbers to how bad 2-strokes are:
> The two-stroke leaf blower was worse still, generating 23 times the CO and nearly 300 times more NMHC than the crew cab pickup. Let's put that in perspective. To equal the hydrocarbon emissions of about a half-hour of yard work with this two-stroke leaf blower, you'd have to drive a [Ford F150] Raptor for 3,887 miles
I suppose it depends on where you live but in the USA at least most, if not all, mowers and generators are 4 stroke engines.
2-stroke are awful because they do not have oil sumps - the oil is mixed into the fuel and drawn into the piston through the crank case where some of the oil sticks to the moving parts to lubricate them. The rest is burnt and emitted as that awful blue smoke.
They're kinda clever as they can operate in any orientation thanks to the lack of the oil sump which makes them ideal for portable power tools which have to operate at a variety of angles. They also have no valves so are less complex and easier to maintain and have a pretty good power to weight ratio. They are valued in developing nations because of this so they are hard to get rid of.
>> Is there anything good samaritan citizens can do locally (on a standard residential lot) to improve the particulate pollution levels outdoors around their house? (and possibly their neighbors' too?).
This is a specific case, but in a mid-sized town where I lived, they opened up a BBQ restaurant with massive outdoor grills. The grills were fired up 5 times a week, evenings and afternoons. While it was fun times with friends at the restaurant, the entire neighborhood smelled of BBQ. Worse, you could literally go on the PurpleAir US map and see the giant visual of where the smoke was going.
I cant imagine how the property values fared for nearby homes.
I dont know anything about restaurant regulations, but it seems that if BBQ was allowed at this scale and allowed on a daily basis, there should be some sort of filtering requirement for exhaust. Good samaritan citizens' strongest chance for such local issues is probably voter turnout at local elections.
> Brand new gas-powered leaf blowers and lawn mowers will soon become scarce in California. In October 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law banning the sale of gas-powered lawn mowers and leaf blowers, as well as any other equipment using small off-road engines, also known as SOREs. These engines traditionally power equipment used in lawn care and landscaping.
> Small engine-based tools are a surprisingly large source of carbon emissions and air pollution. According to the California Air Resources Board, just one hour of gas leaf blower use is the equivalent of driving 1,100 miles. Running a gas lawn mower for the same period equates to a 300-mile drive.
Basically don't use anything with a two-stroke engine, they are horrible for the environment. There's an astonishing-but-true fact that California's leaf blowers make more particulate pollution than all the cars and trucks in the state put together because two-strokes are so dirty.
I got a rechargeable battery powered leaf blower last year and love it. Plenty powerful for my needs, and ~10 mins is almost always plenty for all I need to get stuff cleaned up.
But i suppose they might temporarily kick up a bunch of dust, regardless of power source...
I think the source of the PM pollutant is more important than the number of particles of a specific size. For example: I don't have no data or research on how bad the smoke from the barbecue is for your health, but my intuition tells me it's probably less harmful than the smoke from an old car that needs an oil change, regardless of that the metric says about the number of particles.
The primary action of particulate matter is that it gets stuck in your body (and tiny PM can penetrate into the brain) and is an inflammatory irritant the rest of your life, leading to disease. It stands to reason if the PM is also a toxic particle, the impact is worse.
> Is there anything good samaritan citizens can do locally (on a standard residential lot) to improve the particulate pollution levels outdoors around their house? (and possibly their neighbors' too?).
I would say electrifying your home would be a good first step. For example, we could replace following at home starting with:
There's another side to it, while pollen is larger than PM2.5, in some weather conditions (Melbourne's cool changes for one) it will burst into multiple PM2.5 fragments.
I run a lil air quality sensor in the Miller neighbourhood of Gary, IN. I started off with a PurpleAir II, then higher tech monitor from AQMesh for a few months, and now I operate another higher tech monitor from a local company in Valparaiso, IN called Sensit Technologies, which they generously donated.
I also operate a AIS boat tracker from FleetMon. I did track aircraft flying to/from ORD/MDW/GYY, and also the local train operator SouthShore line have an open API (I wish the other tracks, Norfolk Southern, would have an API!)
I built a crappy lil frontend/api using Express and do plan to continue to work on it and track more stuff, hopefully more people with use it. Hopefully it convinces some more citizen scientists to run their own (bring your own cloud & hardware)
It's actually had a lot of visits recently due the the BP oil refinery leaking SO2 after a recent storm [1], and now the Canadian wildfires bringing that PM our way, our air quality is the worst it's been since I've started to track it.
I was hoping to figure out how to turn the years of data into an infographic, or use AI to digest the data and generate a bunch of useful data points/stats. If anyone knows of an easy way, rather than creating the queries by hand!
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder! Gary is home to some beautiful flora and fauna, we have miles and miles of beautiful Lake Michigan shoreline, the 61st National Park. I'm at 990~ miles of biking in/around Gary and I've took some really beautiful photos, which I'm hoping to compile into something like blog post "1000 miles in/around Gary" or something.
Everything else is just like everywhere else. Poverty.
This is an awesome project, I would love to do something similar for my community. Great UX design too. FYI, the trends and weather modals aren't loading data (possibly because of the darksky.net API cutoff?)
Hey I appreciate that, just been tinkering with it as I added more to it... it's came a long way from when I ran a simple PurpleAirII!
Yeah I'm working on the Darksky replacement, but the trends issues is because of another hidden cost of air quality monitoring: lots of data! My mongo queries aren't the most efficient and for the past week or two I must have topped a Mongo/RAM issue and my DO box is running into memory issues. I'll hopefully get that fixed soon! Especially now, it's a cool lil feature as you can see around what day/time we first started to get hit with the CA wildfire smoke.
Feel free to pull it and add to it as you want! You could probably just use a PurpleAirII monitor near you and use that as for your AQI until you get something else, and disable all the other stuff (boats, advisories, etc), and keep traffic, planes, air quality. That's kinda how I've been doing it anyway.
A sadly common patterns, reduced API access, worse free plan, and increasing costs. Reminds me of Redhat and Reddit.
I just wanted to mention airthings. Turn key, cloud enabled, and "just works". But also has a github repo with examples for importing data into graphana, reading data from into a Raspberry Pi, etc. Said tools talk directly to the device, so you can skip the cloud completely.
I've got one gateway (if you plug in a usb-c power source) it reads data from the devices over bluetooth then uploads to the cloud. But you can do similar with a Pi. Then distribute the bluetooth sensors around the house. I was surprised to get good coverage over 3 floors of a house with BLE to a single gateway.
View plus is the gateway (when it has USB-c power, otherwise just a sensor), has radon, PM 2.5, CO2, temp, VOCs, air pressure, and humidity. It just works. Wave plus is the similar without the gateway, it has radon, CO2, temp, VOCs, air pressure, and humidity.
Nice quality hardware that "just works" out of the box with a free cloud, but you can later import the data directly (not a cloud download) into graphana or similar.
The batteries last a year or so, as advertised. The app is decent, and there's a web dashboard for more control of the presentation.
> reduced API access, worse free plan, and increasing costs.
Expect a lot more of this over the next year. We've all gotten used to generous free plans due to the era of zero percent interest and high growth; that era is ending (at least temporarily). Almost every SaaS business that has not already re-done their pricing tiers since the interest rate hikes is in the process of doing so. Oh, and ad-supported plans are going to get way more aggressive on the ads.
Although the direct effects are awful it feels like we should surely (in the long term) want services to be sustainable - i.e. the cost of the service to be paid for by its users. Where services are not sustainable (and require donations/grants) this should be explicit and transparent.
Cheap money lasted for such a long time that we're all used to being on economic painkillers 24/7.
I hope it's not going to be too bad. We'll have some delay, but soon more open source projects should fill the underserved spaces. The generous free plans stopped many interesting projects from being created, but as a side effect that's also going to change.
That's optional, you can skip the cloud and download the data directly from the device over bluetooth and dump it into graphana or whatever floats your boat.
It seems this wasn't mentioned before, but in Germany some communal open data labs created instructions on how to build an air quality sensor setup and a corresponding map visualizing the results (all over the world by now).
I was thinking about getting a SAF Aranet4 recently but looks like you're tied to their app to viewing the data. This article helped me second guess my choice.
I would much rather such a nice looking device have a simple API that some docker container can query and present a UI for, and/or would integrate with HomeKit or HomeBridge which it looks like it does not.
Does HN have any recommendations? Should I even bother with optimizing another metric beyond "open the windows every couple hours", assuming outdoor AQI is OK?
These Airgradient blog posts are great marketing because they give people like me a chance to talk about how good their devices are :)
I put together an Airgradient Basic based on their PCB design, a slightly more accurate temp/humidity sensor (in retrospect probably not worth it), and the USB-C version of the microcontroller they recommended at the time. Soldering everything took an hour or so, and I also 3d printer a case. IMO the display doesn't look as nice as an Eink would (a la the Aranet), but it probably wouldn't be too difficult to mod one in.
However I don't actually look at the display much, I have it hooked up into Home Assistant so I can check everything on my phone. Granted, the main lesson I've learned is the one you mentioned: open the windows every once in a while, especially if the oven or stove are on. It was also cool to validate that my air purifier actually works.
You're not limited to the Aranet4 app. The device speaks Bluetooth and there are Python and Go libraries for parsing the protocol. There is also a Prometheus exporter for it.
I have no affiliation with Air Gradient (who wrote TFA) but I recently assembled one of their DIY devices (the Pro Pre-soldered version) and I'm quite happy with it.
> Since the AirGradient DIY Pro Kits are fully open-cource [sic] you can send the data to any server, i.e. Home Assistant
If you can put lego together you can assemble this device, and the price is right IMO, especially compared to competitors. I don't think it's as compact or good looking as an Aranet 4, and it's not portable unless you use a battery bank, but's it half the price.
I got an IKEA air quality sensor for $50. It reports readings over Zigbee (PM 2.5 and tVOC, along with temperature and humidity), which is great. The PM2.5 reading is within 2-3 μm/m3 of my laser sensor that I got off of Ali, so quite accurate.
My Aranet4 has been great, the original batteries lasted well over a year with even with Bluetooth transmissions enabled, which can be read by any BLE application (I use Home Assistant). You only "need" the app for firmware updates, speaking of which, the most recent firmware update seems to have thrown my calibration out of whack as outdoor air now reads 600ppm. Hopefully they fix it soon.
The open source nature of our air quality monitor kits give you a number of choices for data transfer. You can use the monitor and send the data directly to your end point, e.g. through ESPHome or just change our default firmware and change the http post endpoint to your own server.
Alternatively, if you want to use the AirGradient dashboard, we do also have an API that you can access your own data.
This reminds me of how Strava encourages users to tick the "share my data with city transportation planners" box and make it sound to users like they're awesome dudes who share this data to be great citizens helping out The Cause for alternative transportation.
...and then I talked to an urban planner who told me that:
* Strava's data was worthless to them, mostly because the vast majority of transportation riders do not even remotely care about mapping their transportation riding so there isn't much data and it has a huge skew toward the riding habits of white, wealthy, tech bros and social media gals. The kind of people who are already well-represented at community meetings, emailed surveys, and traffic counts centered around 9-5 commuters. It's the "invisible" commuters - migrant, blue collar, service industry - especially shift workers - who are difficult to try and find/count. They can't afford to show up to 4pm city hearings, may not speak english, or it simply never occurs to them to look for any of this and bike advocacy orgs have historically done a terrible job of outreach (many are aware of this and have been trying to work on it, or at least try to account for the bias.)
* The data isn't provided free of charge, and in fact its provided at prohibitively expensive rates compared to other data sources, even for a relatively small city. I don't remember the exact figures, but I believe for a east coast small city it was "approaching a mile of bike lane" costs, ie tens of thousands of dollars.
Funny this popped up on HN. I just went down this rabbit hole a week or two ago and settled on a Nettigo DIY kit. You solder a few of these sensors together, flash an opensource firmware on the Wemos D1 running the thing and you're good to go. Works out of the box with Homeassistant as well. Looks very similar to this airgradient one.
The unit I got has a heating element to combat condensation and the like for outdoor use, humidity and temp sensors, air pressure, and PM2.5 + PM10
Readit News
I think the underlying picture here really is that I and my co-founder are both heavily affected by air pollution in Northern Thailand and are seeing how it affects the health of thousands of people.
We believe strongly that air quality monitoring should be affordable so that people from poorer regions and countries can afford air quality monitoring and thus protect their health by knowing when the air quality turns bad. This is one of the reasons why we open-sourced our air quality designs [1] and are working with many NGOs and Universities to bring accurate low-cost air quality monitoring to underserved communities around the world.
Since we are a self-funded company we do not have pressure to maximize profit but can work under the mantra "Impact first (and profit will follow if we do a good job)."
By the way, if you work in air quality research, we are currently running a global co-location test program and are interested in additional partners [2].
[1] https://www.airgradient.com/kits/
[2] https://www.airgradient.com/research/
I am in EU and concerned that it might not be feasible for me to order your products due to high import fees, tax, customs, VAT, etc. that I would probably need to handle myself. Do you plan on establishing a dealer in EU or a shipping site in EU such that items can be shipped from within EU without customers having to deal with the customs, tax, etc?
EU dealer would have to pay the same import fees and VAT. It would be less of a hassle, but probably not cheaper.
I got the presoldered version, kind of expecting it to be 100% assembled, but it was even better that I had to to "plug" the sensors and microcontroller in! It made me feel like I had achieved something myself, and gave an appreciation of how it works :)
The quality of the product looks excellent - inside and out. Although maybe some snap-in transparent plastic in front of the display would protect it from accidental damage? Not that there is any reason to ever touch it, so I guess its not really that important. It certainly doesnt detract from the overall build quality.
A minor niggle on adding the sensor to the online app - i didn't get any feedback that it had added, and when i tried a second time it told me that it was already added. Also, I cant see a way to add/edit places other than creating the one during setup. Probably a few other minor UX niggles I can send an email if desired? But overall it looks great!
I am very interested to see how the air quality changes during the next kiln firings. Thanks!
If it's the former, it might be useful to make that more clear on your site as I could not confirm it.
With proper calibration, the PMS5003 sensor AirGradient uses is a real and fairly good measurement of PM1 (<1 micron), which is often fairly correlated with (and makes up much of) PM2.5. However, the sensor cannot really see particles larger than 1 micron, which sometimes matters for PM2.5 (when the PM1:PM2.5 ratio changes, like wildfires), and very much matters for PM10. That's why QuantAQ uses a PMS5003 combined with a different sensing technology (an optical particle counter) to actually measure PM2.5 and PM10, not just extrapolate from a PM1 measurement.
We have a blog post here explaining more: https://blog.quant-aq.com/can-your-plantower-pms5003-based-a...
I love the work that AirGradient is doing making AQ sensing technology open and accessible, especially to hardware hackers. The BOM cost of the OPC sensor we use alongside the PMS5003 is more than the cost of the entire AirGradient kit, so it is valuable to have options in the market depending on application.
All low cost sensors are using the laser scattering technique and thus do approximate the mass and not a direct measurement.
However tests show that PM2.5 is the most accurate and often PM10 in these sensors is not very good.
I grew up in Southern California back when it was hard to see the mountains ten miles away on bad days.
I lived in Bangkok for two years. At the worst of the year I still wandered around maskless, thinking "feels like my childhood!" So for me it really didn't seem that bad, but I'm glad people are taking it more seriously now.
I looked into your product, but needed a monitoring solution, not a hobby project. I ended up paying a bit over $1000 for a (more capable) ambient weather solution, which meets the requirements in your blog post (with the possible exception of repairability).
Anyway, I’d have paid about 2x your pre-soldered kit price for a thing that came pre-assembled, with software preloaded, and an idiot proof way to publish the results to local devices and/or cloud services.
I am comfortable with soldering irons, writing embedded software, etc. However, I have plenty of money, but no time. I’m sure you could make large margins off of people like me, and plow it back into additional products.
Best of luck! You’re doing cool stuff!
I got everything to work with ESPHome, except for the BSEC version of the BME680 driver (I added a BME60 because I had one lying around. It worked fine with BSEC and ESPHOME on the ESP8266). I was thinking of sharing my experience, but I never got to it
Thank you for sharing this.
I'm genuinely wondering how our nose is not a good enough sensor. Are there common cases that affect large areas like the one you live in, where the pollution is not smellable?
Thank you
But with just a nose it's hard to say if it's 100 μg/m3 of or 200 μg/m3 of PM2.5.
What are the effects of trees/plants on PM2.5 pollution? Are there plants that catch more? Do damp leaves catch more?
Does watering plants with a mist pull extra microparticles out of the air vs a stream? (if so, Do plants mind or benefit from the extra stuff in their water?)
Are there any "permaculture" solutions for air filtration? Could a filter caked with pm2.5 black carbon and whatnot be useful for anything else? Can I manufacture a filter that will reduce pm2.5 using home grown plant materials?
What if I converted a wall of my shed into all filtration material, made it airtight, and pushed air out the other side of the shed under solar power? How would 100sqft of filter give flexibility of filter media?
If I made a giant/parallelized bong in my backyard that constantly pulled air through water to try to catch microparticles, how big would it have to be to have an appreciable effect? Would ground charcoal in the water help?
The most important thing is: Don't use any kind of 2-stroke gas engine powered appliances. Leaf blowers, bush trimmers, mowers, cheap electricity generators... they aren't covered by usual emission regulations and thus have barely any exhaust filtering, leading to emission of insane amounts of all kinds of toxins. On top of that they're all very bad for the local ecosystem - mowed grass tends to dry out faster, leaf blowing (or removal in general) kills safe spaces for small lifeforms.
The next major pollutant are all sorts of furnaces and cooking appliances. Be it a wood pellet, gas or oil heating system, a gas stove, or the once-every-weekend BBQ... it all shows up on air quality sensors. Get a heat pump for heating (there are bi-directional air conditioners that can heat in the winter and cool in the summer), take care to not overheat oils in pans (decomposing oils are quite toxic!), and for heavens sake cut back on the BBQs if you value your lungs and those of your neighbours.
The last part is to quit smoking.
> The two-stroke leaf blower was worse still, generating 23 times the CO and nearly 300 times more NMHC than the crew cab pickup. Let's put that in perspective. To equal the hydrocarbon emissions of about a half-hour of yard work with this two-stroke leaf blower, you'd have to drive a [Ford F150] Raptor for 3,887 miles
https://www.edmunds.com/car-reviews/features/emissions-test-...
2-stroke are awful because they do not have oil sumps - the oil is mixed into the fuel and drawn into the piston through the crank case where some of the oil sticks to the moving parts to lubricate them. The rest is burnt and emitted as that awful blue smoke.
They're kinda clever as they can operate in any orientation thanks to the lack of the oil sump which makes them ideal for portable power tools which have to operate at a variety of angles. They also have no valves so are less complex and easier to maintain and have a pretty good power to weight ratio. They are valued in developing nations because of this so they are hard to get rid of.
Wood and charcoal, yes. But natural gas and propane are clean burning. The difference between them are several orders of magnitude.
This is a specific case, but in a mid-sized town where I lived, they opened up a BBQ restaurant with massive outdoor grills. The grills were fired up 5 times a week, evenings and afternoons. While it was fun times with friends at the restaurant, the entire neighborhood smelled of BBQ. Worse, you could literally go on the PurpleAir US map and see the giant visual of where the smoke was going.
I cant imagine how the property values fared for nearby homes.
I dont know anything about restaurant regulations, but it seems that if BBQ was allowed at this scale and allowed on a daily basis, there should be some sort of filtering requirement for exhaust. Good samaritan citizens' strongest chance for such local issues is probably voter turnout at local elections.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
> Brand new gas-powered leaf blowers and lawn mowers will soon become scarce in California. In October 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law banning the sale of gas-powered lawn mowers and leaf blowers, as well as any other equipment using small off-road engines, also known as SOREs. These engines traditionally power equipment used in lawn care and landscaping.
> Small engine-based tools are a surprisingly large source of carbon emissions and air pollution. According to the California Air Resources Board, just one hour of gas leaf blower use is the equivalent of driving 1,100 miles. Running a gas lawn mower for the same period equates to a 300-mile drive.
https://www.cnet.com/home/yard-and-outdoors/loud-gas-belchin...
https://ww3.arb.ca.gov/msprog/offroad/sm_en_fs.pdf
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/04/30/gas-le... ("Gas leaf blowers and lawn mowers are shockingly bad for the planet. Bans are beginning to spread.")
(electric landscaping tools are at parity, check out the EGO brand for an example: https://egopowerplus.com/)
But i suppose they might temporarily kick up a bunch of dust, regardless of power source...
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I would say electrifying your home would be a good first step. For example, we could replace following at home starting with:
Gas Furnace & AC -- Heat pump
Gas cooktop -- Electric cooktop
Gas Blowers, Mowers -- Electric versions of same
Can I come hang out for a bit?
And people who drive generally have a legitimate need for one.
"Make your next car an EV" would be a better statement.
Dead Comment
I also operate a AIS boat tracker from FleetMon. I did track aircraft flying to/from ORD/MDW/GYY, and also the local train operator SouthShore line have an open API (I wish the other tracks, Norfolk Southern, would have an API!)
I built a crappy lil frontend/api using Express and do plan to continue to work on it and track more stuff, hopefully more people with use it. Hopefully it convinces some more citizen scientists to run their own (bring your own cloud & hardware)
https://millerbeach.community
It's actually had a lot of visits recently due the the BP oil refinery leaking SO2 after a recent storm [1], and now the Canadian wildfires bringing that PM our way, our air quality is the worst it's been since I've started to track it.
I was hoping to figure out how to turn the years of data into an infographic, or use AI to digest the data and generate a bunch of useful data points/stats. If anyone knows of an easy way, rather than creating the queries by hand!
https://github.com/kingsloi/community-airmonitor
[1] https://abc7chicago.com/sulfur-smell-indiana-bp-refinery-whi...
Everything else is just like everywhere else. Poverty.
Yeah I'm working on the Darksky replacement, but the trends issues is because of another hidden cost of air quality monitoring: lots of data! My mongo queries aren't the most efficient and for the past week or two I must have topped a Mongo/RAM issue and my DO box is running into memory issues. I'll hopefully get that fixed soon! Especially now, it's a cool lil feature as you can see around what day/time we first started to get hit with the CA wildfire smoke.
Feel free to pull it and add to it as you want! You could probably just use a PurpleAirII monitor near you and use that as for your AQI until you get something else, and disable all the other stuff (boats, advisories, etc), and keep traffic, planes, air quality. That's kinda how I've been doing it anyway.
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I just wanted to mention airthings. Turn key, cloud enabled, and "just works". But also has a github repo with examples for importing data into graphana, reading data from into a Raspberry Pi, etc. Said tools talk directly to the device, so you can skip the cloud completely.
I've got one gateway (if you plug in a usb-c power source) it reads data from the devices over bluetooth then uploads to the cloud. But you can do similar with a Pi. Then distribute the bluetooth sensors around the house. I was surprised to get good coverage over 3 floors of a house with BLE to a single gateway.
View plus is the gateway (when it has USB-c power, otherwise just a sensor), has radon, PM 2.5, CO2, temp, VOCs, air pressure, and humidity. It just works. Wave plus is the similar without the gateway, it has radon, CO2, temp, VOCs, air pressure, and humidity.
Nice quality hardware that "just works" out of the box with a free cloud, but you can later import the data directly (not a cloud download) into graphana or similar.
The batteries last a year or so, as advertised. The app is decent, and there's a web dashboard for more control of the presentation.
Github repos at https://github.com/Airthings
Expect a lot more of this over the next year. We've all gotten used to generous free plans due to the era of zero percent interest and high growth; that era is ending (at least temporarily). Almost every SaaS business that has not already re-done their pricing tiers since the interest rate hikes is in the process of doing so. Oh, and ad-supported plans are going to get way more aggressive on the ads.
Cheap money lasted for such a long time that we're all used to being on economic painkillers 24/7.
Cloud. As soon as it's in the cloud, it's not yours.
Just a matter of time for the next round of closing some API and boom there goes your access to data.
https://sensor.community/en/
Original page (only in German?) https://luftdaten.info/
Map: http://deutschland.maps.sensor.community/
I would much rather such a nice looking device have a simple API that some docker container can query and present a UI for, and/or would integrate with HomeKit or HomeBridge which it looks like it does not.
Does HN have any recommendations? Should I even bother with optimizing another metric beyond "open the windows every couple hours", assuming outdoor AQI is OK?
I put together an Airgradient Basic based on their PCB design, a slightly more accurate temp/humidity sensor (in retrospect probably not worth it), and the USB-C version of the microcontroller they recommended at the time. Soldering everything took an hour or so, and I also 3d printer a case. IMO the display doesn't look as nice as an Eink would (a la the Aranet), but it probably wouldn't be too difficult to mod one in.
However I don't actually look at the display much, I have it hooked up into Home Assistant so I can check everything on my phone. Granted, the main lesson I've learned is the one you mentioned: open the windows every once in a while, especially if the oven or stove are on. It was also cool to validate that my air purifier actually works.
> Since the AirGradient DIY Pro Kits are fully open-cource [sic] you can send the data to any server, i.e. Home Assistant
If you can put lego together you can assemble this device, and the price is right IMO, especially compared to competitors. I don't think it's as compact or good looking as an Aranet 4, and it's not portable unless you use a battery bank, but's it half the price.
https://www.airgradient.com/kits/
.. had me confused for longer than I like to admit, I assume you meant μg/m3?
The open source nature of our air quality monitor kits give you a number of choices for data transfer. You can use the monitor and send the data directly to your end point, e.g. through ESPHome or just change our default firmware and change the http post endpoint to your own server.
Alternatively, if you want to use the AirGradient dashboard, we do also have an API that you can access your own data.
You should contact the national public WeatherSTEM program!
They have a great open-data network in all kinds of public community places like universities and firehouses and such.
But WeatherSTEM does not have air quality sensors! That is a huge oversight.
If your hardware can be paired with all their rigs nationally, you'd blow away all other services like purpleair overnight.
https://www.weatherstem.com/dashboard?public_access_token=e7...
...and then I talked to an urban planner who told me that:
* Strava's data was worthless to them, mostly because the vast majority of transportation riders do not even remotely care about mapping their transportation riding so there isn't much data and it has a huge skew toward the riding habits of white, wealthy, tech bros and social media gals. The kind of people who are already well-represented at community meetings, emailed surveys, and traffic counts centered around 9-5 commuters. It's the "invisible" commuters - migrant, blue collar, service industry - especially shift workers - who are difficult to try and find/count. They can't afford to show up to 4pm city hearings, may not speak english, or it simply never occurs to them to look for any of this and bike advocacy orgs have historically done a terrible job of outreach (many are aware of this and have been trying to work on it, or at least try to account for the bias.)
* The data isn't provided free of charge, and in fact its provided at prohibitively expensive rates compared to other data sources, even for a relatively small city. I don't remember the exact figures, but I believe for a east coast small city it was "approaching a mile of bike lane" costs, ie tens of thousands of dollars.
The unit I got has a heating element to combat condensation and the like for outdoor use, humidity and temp sensors, air pressure, and PM2.5 + PM10
https://nettigo.eu/products/nettigo-air-monitor-0-3-base-kit