[slavoingilizov]

Honest question - monitoring air quality accurately is great, but monitoring doesn't solve problems. Once you know it's bad, what do you do? I've been wondering what's the point of monitoring something if you can't do anything about it? Do people move house when it's consistently bad? Are the majority of issues caused by in-house pollutants so you open windows for ventilation more? Maybe I'm biased but in my neck of the woods, the bad air quality comes from _outside_. So unless I up sticks, not much else to do.

[alias_neo]

I built a PM2.5 and PM10 monitoring "box" for Home Assistant when we got our log-stove installed.

The goal was to know how bad the air quality would be in our living room / home.

Having used it for several weeks, now I've learned a couple of things;

The air quality _in_ the house is usually _much_ better than it is outside, for example, I measure an average of 1-2ug/m3 inside, but if I take it outside or open the window it can rise to 20-30ug/m3, we live on a fairly busy road. I looked into the UK air quality guidelines and the advice is literally to "close your windows".

Second, the log stove has no effect on the (PM) air quality in the living room when burning properly, however, opening the door to refuel, or not lighting it to a proper burn can cause the levels to shoot up to 70ug/m3 or as high as 200ug/m3 if you let a lot of smoke out while dicking around with the fire, this has a pretty slow fall-off and usually takes hours to drop back to "normal".

I want a CO2 monitor next to check CO2 levels too.

[karmelapple]

Do you have a CO2 or other air monitor at your home? Do you have a gas oven? Every time I turned on my gas oven, the CO2 would spike from 600ppm to over 1200ppm almost immediately. I wouldn’t have known that without a meter, and wouldn’t have realized my air quality was bad inside.

[BelleOfTheBall]

You can use methods of cleaning the air in your house, I assume things like humidifiers and specialized air conditioning/cleaning units exist. The point of these sensors is to show the problem actually exists. If thousands of people suddenly find out their home air is compromised, that will then create a demand for air purification tools.

[blago]

Air purifiers work pretty well for most kinds of pollution, and they are widely available.

[jabroni_salad]

I'm bad with pollen and air filters have been good for me. It's just on a timer though, I don't use any fancy sensors.