Saturday, August 14, 2021

Smoke, Round Two

 

We've had the (un)fortunate opportunity to test out the sensors again, during an official heat wave + air quality warning notice. This time, I wanted to compare the indoor and outdoor quality with the presence of an air filter. The tests started with the two sensors moved over from my parents' place and left inside our apartment for a few hours. The first data point was soon after throwing the one sensor onto the balcony, while the other one was placed inside.

Based on the measurements, it looks like the worst of it only spanned Friday during the day and the early parts of Saturday morning:



Beyond the general trend over August 13-14, this data seems to suggest is that:

a.) indoor air quality is better
b.) indoor air quality tracks the outdoor one, to some extent despite the filtration

The obvious questions that I'd like to ask based on this include:

- would swapping the two sensors have yielded similar results?
- assuming the sensors at least track the levels somewhat consistently, how much of the indoor air quality improvement is due to the active filtration?

At some point another neat test would be to sample at higher intervals around the kitchen to see the effect of cooking, coffee roasting, etc. So far, I can also see that cooking has a pretty significant effect:


This was with the balcony doors closed, and you can see the HUGE spike at around 8 in the morning caused by cooking on the stove, even with the vent hood going! At least it came back down quite fast...






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