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You’re rarely very far from one unless you’re well out into the sparsely populated parts of the country, and if you’re in a city, you’re likely not more than a few miles from the nearest monitor. It uses EPA and state and municipal monitoring stations (and occasionally those used at industrial sites, such as mines, where air quality is a pressing concern), and it offers direct AQI readings from multiple monitors in every state. All of these apps use your location to find the nearest direct or estimated AQI, as AirNow does, but it’s frustrating not to be able to quickly check on the air quality elsewhere, such as you might want to do before a trip, or if you’re concerned about family or friends who are far away.Īmong the apps we tested, AirNow also collects data from the widest network of monitors.
#Purple air quality series#
To find the place you’re interested in, you have to go through a tedious series of steps, first picking your region of the planet, then your country, then (in the US) your state-and then you have to scroll through all the city and town names to find yours.
#Purple air quality code#
(I typed in Moorefield, wanting to see what the conditions were in the West Virginia town I spent summers in as a kid, and Airly produced a list of five “Moorefield, United States of America” entries for me to pick through until I found the correct one.) AirVisual doesn’t let you do zip code or place-name searches, period. Airly doesn’t seem to recognize zip codes at all, and it doesn’t differentiate place names by state. AirCare, for example, lets you search by zip code, but if that location doesn’t have a monitor, the app doesn’t suggest the nearest one to it, leaving you to hunt around on the app’s rather sparse map or guess at other nearby zip codes until you find a reading. The other apps we tried- AirCare, Airly, and IQAir AirVisual ( iOS) ( Android)-are less adept. And in digging further, we discovered that the Environmental Protection Agency has extensively studied (PDF) home air quality monitors (part of a class of monitors it refers to as low-cost sensors) and found their accuracy and longevity wanting, with their VOC sensors lasting for just six months to a year before starting to fail.
When we looked back at the competitors we had originally tested but not picked, we found a similar pattern of complaints on some of them.
Many reviews we read also complained of glitchy Wi-Fi connections and poor customer support. We had found them to be reliable on particulate readings in our testing, but clearly something was going wrong once the devices had run for a while in many people’s homes. We never gave up on our original goal of recommending an indoor air quality monitor, yet when revisiting this guide in autumn 2021, we were alarmed by the number of serious, credible complaints stating that our 2019 air quality monitor picks delivered obviously inaccurate readings, especially for volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
#Purple air quality how to#
We contacted a researcher to talk about using CO2 monitors for air quality measurements, and together we came up with a product recommendation, as well as some advice on how to interpret and react to its information when monitoring CO2 at home. And even absent the virus, both public spaces and homes can accumulate high levels of CO2 from everyday activities-not just breathing, but from using gas stoves and water heaters. Researchers at the University of Colorado in Boulder found that CO2 levels could be used as a proxy for coronavirus risk in crowded public indoor spaces because we exhale both CO2 and, if we’re sick, viruses in the same breath.
#Purple air quality upgrade#
And whether you have measured proof or just a hunch that your indoor air quality is poor, there are simple, consistently effective ways to clear the air as much as possible: Run an air purifier or upgrade your HVAC filters to capture fine airborne particles, and open your windows on nice days to vent any volatile organic compounds.įor 2022, we have added a recommendation for a CO2 (carbon dioxide) monitor. The EPA has a guide to radon, including state-by-state resources for knowing whether your region is at risk and how to get your home tested. Many smoke detectors also detect carbon monoxide see our guide to smoke alarms for more about them. They rarely measure carbon monoxide and radon, two potentially deadly gases. The type of home-focused indoor air-monitoring devices we evaluated for this guide offer less information by comparison, as they typically measure only the local airborne particle levels and sometimes volatile organic compounds-gases like the vapors from paint, cleaners, and glue. If data (or a hunch) suggests that you have poor air quality, improve it by circulating air through purifiers or HVAC filtration.
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