The hidden cost of air quality monitoring
airgradient.com
airgradient.com
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].
If it's the former, it might be useful to make that more clear on your site as I could not confirm it.
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.
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.
What does affect air quality in my home massively, are the people parking their vehicles surrounding my home morning and afternoon as they drop off and pick up their children from the nearby school. I see a 10x ambient measure at these times. I was starting to think about how I could use BLE monitoring to track this somehow (the other thing my home is surrounded with at these times is devices broadcasting Bluetooth "beacons"(?)); could be an interesting experiment.
The next step for me is really knowing what and how something can be done about the pollution (generally speaking); Monitoring is great, but what's the next step?
Short term: install air filters
Long term: banning ICE cars
Also where there is good air, there ain't so many people.
A commercial model is around $200.
There are a lot of options so decide if you want to build it or buy it and plug it in!
Then you can list your data on a site like https://explore.openaq.org/
Then, I found a board from Adafruit. The chip is so tiny in the Adafruit photo!
Short answer, $1500 + $300 annually (includes cellular, realtime data calibration in our cloud, and full API access).
Relevant to the topic above, we are building for a slightly different market than AirGradient, and want to make sure we're an appropriate solution for potential customers -- you might genuinely be better served by a different product! As such, we're currently not optimized for low touch single sales to individuals, but it's something we'd like to improve in the future.
If you do contact sales, and we end up being a good fit for what you're looking for, we'd love to help!
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 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!
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
0: https://www.digikey.com/short/rhbvm452 1: https://www.instructables.com/Radon-Mitigation-Monitor/
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.
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?
After you are locked into their ecosystem, they prevent you from selling for less elsewhere, even on your own site, they coerce you into paying them ad fees to boost your listing in their search results, and if you don't pay them enough they will put your competitors above you and redirect searches that are specifically for your product to other similar items.
Then, if despite all of that you do well, they will find some company in China to make an "Amazon Basics" version of whatever it is that you're selling and then undercut you on price and boost their listings above yours.
You might even say that this is a win for consumers since they get fast cheap access to products, but the product quality is always a race to the bottom and because this happens so often it results in the death of product innovation from good companies because they have to spend so much brainpower and energy keeping the Amazon machine happy while it consumes them.
Ebay is a little better, but that is also rapidly enshittifying as well.
That makes it better than buying from indie sites just about every time.
Whatever Amazon has to offer is not worth what it costs to me, so I vote in other ways by shopping elsewhere, and should I have something to sell I will use other means to sell it.
Register a second company that is exclusively for distribution on amazon, with that company selling at the higher price.
Best done using corps
It can be a bit of hassle sometime, like having to pay for shipping or the delay in receiving it compared to amazon prime, or the option for return.
But apart from covering the shipping (which sometimes is okay for a product with higher value), I prefer to use the original website instead of Amazon. Few reasons being:
1. Genuine product 2. I don't want to help Amazon grow its huge empire 3. I want to support independent companies
So, hearing your comment, I'm glad I'm doing the right thing
EU dealer would have to pay the same import fees and VAT. It would be less of a hassle, but probably not cheaper.
In my country (and I guess many other EU countries - although it varies from country do country), it is a huge hassle and expensive too. And if you make any mistakes in the red tape you get hit with all sorts of ridiculous fees. Also, the package is usually delayed in customs for weeks or months. Whereas packages shipped from within EU typically arrives within next business day of them arriving in the destination country.
So avoiding the hassle is well worth it in order to get to the EU market.
Also, it may actually be cheaper. In my country, the local post office adds a "handling fee" of 30 EUR just for the service of informing you that you need to pay customs, VAT, etc. on the item. At least this is 30 EUR that can be saved on each item.
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!
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?
But i suppose they might temporarily kick up a bunch of dust, regardless of power source...
To me, this is why raking just makes sense. I can’t stand the dust from leaf blowers. And often, just mowing over the leaves is adequate and better for the environment.
New thing I'm trying this year is to pull garden weeds and toss them on top of the grass right before a mow as a two-bird-with-one-stone compost in place free grass fertilizer.
These engines not only produce a ton of particulate emissions, but also a lot of half-burned and unburned hydrocarbons. Including formaldehyde, benzene, and all kinds of other crap.
You can at least filter out particulates with an N99 mask, but it does nothing against hydrocarbons.
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/)
There is a reason combustion vehicles are mandated to have a catalytic converter, and why diesel vehicles must filter particulates.
https://phys.org/news/2014-05-two-stroke-scooters-super-poll...
Edit: For example, you’ll see where I asked my initial question here
I'm all for electrifying yard tools, but electric blowers still aren't anywhere near a high end Stihl or Husqvarna in performance.
Compare Table 3 to Table 5. PM emissions from exhaust are on the order of 1 gram per hour. Whereas fugitive dust emissions, depending on the surface, are 100s or 1000s of grams per hour.
There isn't a lot of data on how much the chemical makeup of particulates affects health, nor on what the makeup of particulates likely to be kicked up by a leaf-blower are. At least some of the particulates from two-stroke engine emissions are known to be really bad (e.g. partially combusted lubricants). So the jury is out on if the particulate related health risks are dominated by the engine or the dust. If you think "all PM2.5 is bad" then it's almost certainly dominated by the dust though.
1: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2018-11/Health%20...
Perhaps this is true for certain types of air pollution, but there's no way it's true for carbon emissions. CO2 emitted has to be proportional to gasoline burned. And there's no way a leaf blower is consuming 25 gallons of gas per hour.
To drive 1100 miles, the commenter above gave an extremely generous 25 gallons of gas (likely closer to 40 for a non-Prius).
One gallon of gas produces about 20 pounds of CO2, which is about 73% oxygen (from the atmosphere) by weight. The remaining 27% of the weight comes from carbon.
So, one gallon of gasoline provides 20*0.27=5.4lbs of carbon to the CO2 produced. Multiply by 25, and you're looking at over 135lbs of carbon alone coming from your source when 25 gallons of gas are burned.
Considering that the amount of weight carried around by the user of a leaf blower is on the low tens of pounds, and not hundreds, it seems ludicrous to presume that a leaf blower produces anywhere near the amount of CO2 in an hour as does a car driving 1100 miles.
Even without the oil - 2-stroke engines will run on straight petrol, albeit briefly - they still emit an obscene amount of unburnt fuel.
This is the table in the source:
+--------------------+-------------------+-------------+---------------+
| | Exhaust Emissions | New vehicle | Older vehicle |
+--------------------+-------------------+-------------+---------------+
| Hydrocarbons | 199.26 | 0.39 | 201.9 |
| Carbon Monoxide | 423.53 | 15.97 | 1310 |
| Particulate Matter | 6.43 | 0.13 | 0.78 |
| Fugitive Dust | 48.6-1031 | N/A | N/A |
+--------------------+-------------------+-------------+---------------+
> Another way to visualize the data is to compare emissions for a given amount of leaf blower operation to miles traveled by car. The Air Resources Board regularly publishes such emissions benchmarks. Thus, for the average 1999 leaf blower and car data presented in Table 9, we calculate that hydrocarbon emissions from one-half hour of leaf blower operation equal about 7,700 miles of driving, at 30 miles per hour average speed. The carbon monoxide emission benchmark is signficantly different. For carbon monoxide, one-half hour of leaf blower useage would be equivalent to about 440 miles of automobile travel at 30 miles per hour average speed.
So will old ones, if you run them on the right fuel.
My 25-year-old Range Rover has a 4.6 litre engine adapted to run on propane which is - under the right circumstances - a *negative* emission vehicle. It can have measurably less CO and HC in the exhaust than in the intake air (city air heavily contaminated with CO and HC for example from bus engines).
For most homeowners. Not for commercial usage. There's that battery charge issue still. There are workarounds that can help though.
A complex pays for regular landscaping services which turns into hours of painfully disruptive noise pollution often in the early hours for residents.
Stihl gas blower: 239mph 912cfm
Not even getting into weight, cost, or refuel times - that's extremely far from parity.
[edit]
I found a report[1]; on page 22, the median estimated "fugitive dust" emmisions of blowing on a shoulder, or curb is about 480g (1lb) of PM2.5 per hour. It does note that this is a pure calculation and not empirically tested though. The entire range of their calculations put fugitive dust as higher particulate emissions than the exhaust (though the exhaust particulate of a 3hp leaf-blower (i.e. high-powered commercial) is already nearly 2 orders of magnitude higher than a modern light-duty vehicle and a 0.8hp (i.e. typical personal-use leafblower)).
1: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2018-11/Health%20...
Rain is nice, but that has very little to do with it.
The growth in moat of these countries is up so much they cant burn enough coal to keep from brown outs.
Outsourced pollution.
If you need data, just peak at a global air pollution map. Dive into the historical metrics.
It would be not that inconvenient to not drive for local trips but very inconvenient for longer trips? Or vice versa depending on where you live
People are cooking over coal/wood around the world, that is far far far worse than everything I've read(and that doesnt include industrial pollution). (Although 2 stroke engines and their byproducts are cancer causing, so... that is still valid)
As for 2-storkes, I can't stand them, but they are still a necessary evil in many situations. I have gas and electric chainsaw. The electric doesn't compare in power and capability - but it is also my favorite, so I use it when I can. I love not smelling like 2-stroke exhaust, the electric always "starts" too. Then a larger tree dies or a dozen blow down at once and I have to break out the gas saw...
(Also, if it stays in the garage most of the time, it doesn't really harm anyone. I think that's only common for retired people, though?)
I don't know how to price it. Most people don't really think about it that way.
Our next vehicle will be a full electric but that will probably be another 3-5 years unless we opt to be a one ICE, one electric car family sooner.
And people who drive generally have a legitimate need for one.
"Make your next car an EV" would be a better statement.
As a somewhat serious cyclist (I have 4 bikes - two for the road, two for MTB), I know which kind of car I would rather ride behind. (I have gone through a number of respro filters over the years..)
Sure, ICE cars cause more air pollution than EVs. But things like public transit tend to create even less, since there's not a need to have one vehicle per person.
Since public transit makes so much sense in dense cities compared to EVs, I think a lot of the frustration and down votes you face are due to that issue: why replace one known evil with another, when we have much better options available??
Yes you got to push alternatives.
But at the same time, at least 90% of the cars - and near 100% of buses - that are still going to be sold (no matter how one might wish for new cars not to be needed) should be _electric_ ones.
I live in a sprawled out city (Melbourne, AUS), where, especially if you have kids, a car is close to a darned necessity. So those cars are still going to be sold, and far too many of them are dirty gas guzzlers.
I like to walk and ride as much as possible, but after making the move to an EV myself (near 100% solar powered for half the year, then coal the other half - still way better than oil if you look at the whole CO² emission chain) it's amazing how sensitive I've gotten to petrol and diesel fumes.
We have one electric bus in my area. Absolutely awesome to see this first step. Yet a significant number of our trains are still using diesel - their fumes on that (Spencer Street) main connecting station are ridiculously toxic. There's just so much work to do..
Subways have wear-related particulate emissions too, with the added disadvantage of them being less easy to vent: https://nyulangone.org/news/pre-covid-19-subway-air-polluted...
Can I come hang out for a bit?
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.
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.
I have an electric push mower for our home - we have probably 1500 sqft of grass currently (including the strip in front of our house that might technically be owned by the city) a single charge can mow everything if the grass isn't too long/wet, but there is usually a mow or two after spring rains that has to be done in two parts.
I also have a "cabin" (hopefully future farm) property that was horse pasture a decade ago. My splurge toy last year was an electric riding mower - ours is greenworks - and it is really a joy. Can mow 1-2 acres on a single charge (depending on grass height/dampness). It's so fun my wife and I have actually had an argument about who 'gets' to mow next.
Perhaps my favorite thing about electric mowers is they literally start with a button. Pull starting sucks, especially when it isn't working.
The stereotypical American lawn is a fairly new thing, basically "created" by Scott and the rest of the fertilizer industry in the 60s and 70s. Prior to this, lawns were mixed plants, and not expected to be nearly 100% grass. They were generally more drought tolerant and needed less maintenance (both water, fertilizer, and mowing).
Electric mowers (battery) are sufficiently good today that we really should phase out the sale of gas mowers. At least for "normal" sized lawns. Mechanical push mowers are also an option for small enough lawns.
And aside from inertia, there's no good reason that most yards need to be predominantly grass lawn. I've found that, at least for my small yard, hardscape, shrubs, and other plants are lower maintenance (twice annual pruning, monthly weeding during the grow season). I only water when I add/replace plants or particularly hot/dry weeks. And I've cut out all fertilizer. I've cut the amount of grass by about half and will likely cut it by another half at the end of this season. All my lawn tools are now battery powered as well.
The problem is that there are political parties that make a political platform out of green lawns and BBQs all while knowing that they're deluding their voters and sending them off to catastrophe.
Wood and charcoal, yes. But natural gas and propane are clean burning. The difference between them are several orders of magnitude.
For stoves, gas stoves are being banned for new construction because they don't burn as cleanly as once thought [1].
For BBQs the heat source used doesn't matter (with the exception that coal units should never ever be used indoors), they all emit tons of toxic and highly odorious particles from all the oil and fats decomposing.
[1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/have-a-gas-stove-how-to-...
> 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.
New as in the last 40-50 years? Can you please give me examples of recent 2 stroke mowers and generators available in the USA? I haven't seen a 2 stroke generator or lawnmower in all my years and I used portable generators a bunch at my old job (Coleman, Generac, Honda, etc). However Ive seen plenty of small 2 stroke motors on hand held lawn and garden tools, chain saws, boat engines and dirt bikes.
The only 2-stroke generator I can think of are those really small antique 500W generators that I think Coleman made in the 1960's or 70's?
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
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!
https://github.com/kingsloi/community-airmonitor
[1] https://abc7chicago.com/sulfur-smell-indiana-bp-refinery-whi...
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.
Everything else is just like everywhere else. Poverty.
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
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.
I'm sure you could use a Pi to pull in the data manually via ble if you have no other uses for Home Assistant.
> super easy to setup & 'just works'.
Yeah right. Please tell my mom again how super easy to setup an esp32 is and that it 'just works'.
If mom doesn't want to use the free cloud she might need some help, but it's about as simple as it could be for self hosting, not sure how they could make it easier.
Nobody said anything about having your non-technical mom set it up. The context was using a raspberry pi and ble to pull data from a sensor which heavily implies the person wishing to do it has a decent technical background. What I said is completely reasonable in this context.
Hosting a local server to do data collection isn’t normally something a non-technical person cares about in the slightest to begin with, so it’s pretty irrelevant. Having my devices local and using a hub of sorts to do everything is ideal, to non-technical people it’s a huge hassle. They want cloud enabled easy setup devices.
Or just buy the more expensive model that talks wifi and plug in a USB-c to power it.
We are talking about the Wave Plus, no?
https://www.airthings.com/view-plus
It can run on batteries, but then you lose the functionality of bridging from BLE to wifi.
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.
Develop a long-term plan that builds a stable business, and keeps both the proprietor and customers happy, and I'm happy to support them.
All of this applies equally to businesses that were sustainable (or on a path to sustainability). The amount of money a business can responsibly spend on loss leaders like a free tier is dependent on growth rate and cost of capital.
Now that cost of capital has gone up and growth has gone down, the amount you can reasonably spend on loss leaders is comparatively tiny.
This does not mean we should expect fundamental changes in most business models going forward. Most startups did not take the Vision Fund approach to their business model that so fundamentally warped a few markets (Uber, WeWork, etc.)
Original page (only in German?) https://luftdaten.info/
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?
> 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 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.
.. 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
This is a huge problem that goes way beyond the subject of this article. Most companies (especially publicly traded ones) want recurring revenue on their books, not one-time sales. This is why even traditional hardware vendors like Cisco/Juniper try to get as much recurring revenue as possible with subscriptions to unlock ports etc.
A CFO explained it to me once that "a dollar of one-time sale contributes 1x to our valuation while a dollar of recurring revenue contributes 17x". I may have translated that wrong but you get the idea.
Awair seems to be the best-known consumer brand (?). I use an Awair Element which works great and has no subscription fee for the associated app or local API functionality, so it doesn't seem like it could be them?
That said, IQAir is kind of crazy to me. They launched a new dashboard which has a "view as TV dashboard" button, but doesn't let you click it unless you upgrade your plan. The local data access situation is also unclear to me; I bought the sensor after reading that it has a Samba server, but it requires the indoor monitor to display the password to you. I opened a support case to get the password for local analysis, but am beginning to feel like they're not going to give it to me. (Who wouldn't want an indoor air quality monitor? Well I already have one. I've cared about indoor air quality forever, but after wondering for two days why the sky was a weird shade of yellow, I wanted to keep an eye on outdoor air quality as well.)
In that case, it will be UART time. It's definitely Linux running an out-of-date unpatched Samba. Won't be at all difficult to get my data, I'm guessing. The question is... why do they think there's money in a cloud service that shows you dashboards of your own data? They should be bending over backwards to accommodate anyone that wants to contribute to their public site; they are way behind PurpleAir there.
TL;DR I'm certain that PurpleAir is the unnamed company in this article. IQAir is too new to be relevant in the space.
Ignoring the software, the device itself is great. Two sensors compare their outputs to figure out if it's valid or not, and the case seems quite protective from the elements (and easily mounted to my weather station pole). I didn't need POE, I have AC out there, but overall it's a good way of supplying power to something like this.
In the United States, AirNow.gov includes most PurpleAir sensors, although they are annotated differently than “higher quality” sensors (I was going to say than government sensors, but here in Connecticut, the state has a number of PurpleAir monitors deployed and rapidly deployed more when stuff got bad due to Canadian wildfires a few weeks ago).
Fortunately, for local users, you can hit your own sensor and grab the data however often you want. I even wrote a tool to help out and drop it into influxdb and post it to MQTT[1]. They still support local fetching of data. However, many default integrations from tools like Home Assistant could be affected as they use the cloud integration.
My biggest complaint with Awair is they only let you download the last month of data easily from the app. That said, they are hacker-friendly otherwise -- for example they offer a local API!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Awair/comments/y7i5ku/awair_discont...
Unfortunate that older devices didn't get it, but at least they're following future-proof best practices going forward.
Very carefully chosen questions that tiptoe around the elephant in the room
"Does my data stay local, and do I opt-IN to sending it to your servers?"
I'm sure someone somewhere has some weird specific case which requires an exception to that rule, but I sure don't.
>24 months AirGradient data platform (or connect it to your own server, e.g. home assistant)
and
>Fully open-source code so you can easily make adjustments
So clearly you do have the option.
EPA.gov: A Guide to Siting and Installing Air Sensors
https://www.epa.gov/air-sensor-toolbox/guide-siting-and-inst...
Kind of like this but way way way more sensors and data
https://www.purpleair.com/map?opt=1
Feds need to fund this pronto.
True co2, not equivalent like say the bme680. Previously used equivalent ones and the data is tangibly better. Highly recommend.
Can’t figure out a good way to do pm2.5 without a whiny fan though. The unit I’ve got has a barely audible high pitched whine
It also has a pin that is enabled when the CO2 level exceeds 1000 ppm so you can build a useful monitor using nothing more than an LED and an old USB power adapter.
https://partofthething.com/thoughts/weather-and-air-quality-...
[1] https://partofthething.com/thoughts/making-true-random-numbe...
Typically the solution to high CO2 in indoor air is to exchange it with outdoor air.
Most users will open a window. The energy cost of that is relatively huge, when room air is heated or cooled.
In modern eco buildings, there might be counterflow heat exchangers - those can recover 80+% of the heat - but still, the energy loss through air exchange can quickly add up to be a major component of the buildings energy bill.
I believe we should work towards buildings that don't exhaust dirty air to the environment. Throwing away contaminated stuff and letting nature deal with it is 1900's thinking. We should instead break that CO2 back into oxygen, filter the dust, and remove VOC's. We should fix the air, not replace it.
So far, to my knowledge, nobody does this except on submarines.
https://www.analoxgroup.com/blog/how-do-you-breath-onboard-s...
After the soda lime is maxed out, it's tossed. At least so far as I understand you can't meaningfully re-use it for scrubbing, though there are other industrial uses where it can be re-purposed. Also O2 electrolysis takes a fairly substantial amount of electricity, which is OK when you've got a nuclear generator on your hands.
So.... it's a lot cheaper (and more environmentally friendly) to use an ERV system in your HVAC system even at "only" 80% recovery. Let the plants do what they are good at and deal with capturing CO2 and giving us O2.
The problem is we don't generally build insulated enough or tight enough houses to matter. If everything was built to passive house standard, we'd save HUGE amounts of energy globally.
Does it get re-purposed? Is there an issue to "tossing" it out of the sub while submerged?
This fluid smells like cat piss.
>Weeks et al. (1960) reported that volunteers who smelled MEA vapor described the odor as ammoniacal, musty, or foreign; some volunteers were unable to characterize the odor.
> Ethanolamine is a colorless, viscous liquid with an odor reminiscent of ammonia.
Ammonia is a lot of what "cat piss" smells of, so that tracks. Thanks! That was really interesting to read about!
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanolamine
* https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA389253
* https://www.sonistics.com/wp-content/uploads/01-KEY-DEVELOPM...
* https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/11170/chapter/10#197
For oxygen, fast-growing indoor plants might help a little, but apparently you'd need a lot of them. [1]
> Plants produce 22 L for every 150 g of growth (ref 2). They would need to increase in weight by 3.75 Kg (8 pounds), each day, to produce the oxygen used by one person.
> Keep in mind that plants grow slowly. Adding 3.75 Kg to your houseplants every day would require a huge number of plants.
Carbon capture: not as easy as it sounds. You'll need plenty of sunlight. Grow lamps?
What would you do with eight pounds of plants per day? Hopefully some parts are edible, closing the cycle a little.
I've heard that people growing cannabis will buy CO2, so if there were some other way to capture it then they'd probably take it.
[1] https://www.gardenmyths.com/houseplants-increase-oxygen-leve...
Sadly it's currently factory-sized technology, not something you can install in the basement.
I personally ended up with crazy high CO2 levels, turns out hail crushed the exhaust lid, blocking the airflow, and led to scary high levels that were so bad hand writing changed. Took awhile to track it down, then I started graphing the CO2 levels, figured out was going on, and fixed it the same day. Fortunately hand writing returned to normal.
Most homes aren't going to have serious CO2 levels from just human breathing. Sure modern homes can be so well insulated you have problems, but said homes should be engineered for a specific airflow exchange rate and use heat exchangers as necessary.
Like, the gadget could just as well run a web server accessable on the wifi or maybe Bluetooth.
Yes. Consumers with IoT devices know this too - my LIFX bulbs use this trick basically seamlessly. There is vendor lock-in with the LIFX app but you can also use it through home assistant etc.
I'm building a house in Bangkok and up in Chiang Mai of all places (see the company is from there) and was thinking of adding some air quality sensors there so will definitely check airgradient's out.
If I may ask Achim, do you manufacture in Thailand? What kind of scale you at? No promises, but I have access to some decent sized factories and given your mission, there might be something we can help with.
Had a cool hw kit but sadly not anymore. All the specs are published so clones are trivial.
> Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Undefined constant "php" in /home/public/feed.php:1 Stack trace: #0 {main} thrown in /home/public/feed.php on line 1
Are we surprised?
[1] https://github.com/mikecarper/bondhome/blob/main/weather.sh
I mostly look at aqicn.org and wondering if the airgradient kits can share data with that website?
I think I need someone to explain to me how some of these open source air quality monitors share their data and what websites can use the data.
I don't like to use cloud for stuff like that, nor I need mobile access.
Airly is exactly a case how we should NOT monitor air quality as this company sells cheap stations to (mostly) government with then high monthly fees and with closed access to data obtained from those stations, while at the same time saying words such as "open data".
Source: I'm author of Kanarek mobile app, and had a "pleasure" to work with them. https://spidersweb.pl/2018/01/kanarek-airly-smog-w-polsce.ht...