Category: indoor

Spring Clean Your Indoor Air Quality

Sotirios Papathanasiou6 Comments

During Spring (March, April, May) most people in Northern Hemisphere dedicate extra time to clean and organize their house for the warmer months. Many times we start this process unconscious of the dangerous chemicals present in cleaning products that may be released into the indoor environment. What can we do to improve indoor air quality, especially during spring when many people suffer from allergies?

Here I will conclude a few tips and steps in order to make the most out of this process and detox your house from nasty chemicals and other pollutants/allergens.

1st Tip – Bed Linen

It is important to ventilated bed linen and in case this is not an option we can always change them with clean ones. It is hard to tell how often someone should change the bedsheets but I would recommend at least 2 twice a month. Avoid synthetic textiles like Acrylic, Polyester, Nylon, etc, and invest in good cotton or silk (expensive) sheets and pillowcases as they offer the most comfortable experience, and they don’t pollute the environment once they are washed.

Dead skin and hair can build up and we don’t want to feed dust mites. According to House Dust Biology by J. Bronswijk human skin particles make up approximately 53% of household dust which leads me to the next tip.

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Review: XT Mini by Ethera Labs

Sotirios Papathanasiou1 Comment

Managing air quality monitors (AQM) in buildings is not always an easy task especially if you have deployed a lot of them. When there are many rooms that you have to take into consideration it can become very costly, very fast to equip all those rooms. Is there a way to monitor rooms without an AQM?

Well, it turns out there is a way to monitor the environmental and air quality conditions in rooms that do not have physical monitors nowadays. How?

Ethera Labs, which is a French company, with over 10 years of experience in professional IAQ solutions has integrated powerful Machine Learning (ML) algorithms that predict the conditions in rooms where air quality monitors are not installed, yes that’s right, you have read correctly. They have trained special neural networks by taking a lot of parameters into consideration in order to predict accurately the conditions and alerts users in case they need to take actions or even address an AQ/Environmental incident automatically.

By connecting the station to BMS, they manage to achieve energy efficiency while directly managing the ventilation system, as well as portable air purifiers or giving building operator the right information in advance so they can take action at the right time. They achieve two goals, great air quality and energy efficiency.

Hardware-wise Ethera Labs offers an arrange of monitors that can address different building specifications and needs. In this article, I will review the Mini XT Basic (MX-KIT020) and the NEMo Cloud/Supervision Cloud platforms.

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Review: Aether Air HA30 an in-Vehicle Air Purifier

Sotirios Papathanasiou5 Comments

Commuting to work is proved to contribute the biggest daily exposure to air pollutants according to the University of California. Car filters are not very good at filtering out PM1, PM2.5, and PM10 particles from vehicle emissions as they were originally designed to catch large particles like dust and pollen. Gas filtration is non-existence even today in any vehicle, as a result, drivers and vehicle passengers breathe notorious toxic fumes.

Although I believe that if you live in a city and you work in the same city, you should find a better way to commute, for some people this is not an option. Consequently, they need to find a way to protect themselves and mitigate their exposure to air pollution.

Aether Air HA30 is an in-vehicle air purifier capable of filtering particulate matter and eliminating nitrogen dioxide (NO2) among other chemicals.

It uses the same technology as the HA500 domestic purifier but in a smaller package. The D-Orbital Nano Oxide (DNO) filter, which is an innovative filtration system invented by the founding CTO of Oxford Catalyst plc (a leader in novel industrial catalysts)” and a HEPA 13 filter.

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How to Use CO2 Monitors

Sotirios Papathanasiou2 Comments

I see a lot of pictures on social media platforms where people measure Carbon Dioxide (CO2) concentrations in indoor environments incorrectly.

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Review: Kaiterra Sensedge Mini for Business and Green Buildings

Sotirios Papathanasiou7 Comments

There is a demand for Green Buildings lately, which focus on the comfort and health of the building’s occupants. Energy efficiency was the original target for most of the green buildings certifications programs, but they have evolved, and they now focus on many more aspects of the indoor environments. Indoor Air Quality has become the number one priority for many green building certifications, and in order to be certified, there are strict rules for ventilation and AQ monitoring.

Here comes Kaiterra Sensedge Mini, which is a RESET certified indoor air quality monitor. The Sensedge Mini is a calibrated real-time monitor that has to be placed in buildings that wish to obtain a Green Buildings certification.

The Sensedge Mini uses two removable sensor modules to replace the traditional, costly calibration processes for long-term accuracy with minimal maintenance.

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Study: Taking a closer look at the air quality in classrooms

Sotirios Papathanasiou4 Comments

After almost two months of asking local schools for permission to install air quality monitors in their classrooms, on the 4th of December, a local school decided to grant me access.

In my city, Almeria, Spain, there are about 110 schools. I didn’t apply to all of them because each time I managed to find a way to contact them, I had to arrange a meeting in order to explain to them what I wanted to do, and all this process takes time. I managed to contact nine schools.

For this study, schools didn’t have to pay anything, so money wasn’t the issue for their refusal. They were worried about what will happen if the results were disappointing and negative. I tried to explain to them that the aim of the study is to understand what is going on in the classroom, in real conditions, with real students. I don’t want to discredit the school either the local authorities that manage the budget for the school. For this reason, I will keep the name of the school private.

Monitors

The monitors that I have installed for the study are made by Airthings. There are two Wave Plus, which include a CO2 sensor by Senseair. The sensor is called Sunrise, and it is an ultra-low-power, high precision NDIR sensor. Accuracy (CO2) ±30 ppm ±3% of reading. Finally, it features a self-correction system that allows them to auto-calibrate every 180 hours. I also have included a Wave mini monitor in the teacher’s office room. 

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Things no one talks about: Flatulence and Indoor Air Quality

Sotirios Papathanasiou4 Comments

Have you ever wondered if the gases we produce as humans are toxic to those who live with us?

It is a taboo but I think we all have thought about it at one moment in our lives. Scientifically known as flatus but commonly known as a fart, many of us even use funny expressions to cope with this uncomfortable situation they create like Acid-rain maker, After the thunder comes the rain, Baking brownies, Death Breath, Fire a stink torpedo, pass the gas, etc…

Let’s take a step back and analyze the chemical composition of a flatus. More than 99% of the volume of flatus is composed of non-smelly gases. These include oxygen (O2), nitrogen (N), carbon dioxide (CO2) hydrogen (H) and methane (CH4), keep in mind, methane is a colorless, odorless gas and nitrogen is not produced in the gut, but it is a component of environmental air. The remaining trace (<1% volume) compounds give flatus its smell which comes from a combination of volatile sulfur compounds. Hydrogen sulfide (H₂S), methyl mercaptan (CH4S), dimethyl sulfide (C2H6S), dimethyl disulfide (C2H6S2), and dimethyl trisulfide (C2H6S3).Read More »

Review: BRISE C360 Air Purifier

Sotirios Papathanasiou4 Comments

There are a few things you can do to reduce air pollution indoors like keeping things tight and clean, not smoking, using exhaust fans when you cook, and ventilating the rooms, but at the end of the day if the air pollution comes from outside sources then you need to take drastic measures and there is only one solution, investing in an air purifier.

There are many air purifiers on the market for all types of budgets but you shouldn’t expect a cheap air purifier to offer the same features and purification results as a high-end purifier. By the way, air cleaners and air purifiers are the same things.

BRISE C360 is a high-end purifier capable of purifying up to 95 m2 or 1022 ft2 room and rated CADR at 390 m3/hr or 230CFM. It is recommended for medium size rooms and it packs a ton of features.

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Review: Airthinx IAQ for Businesses

Sotirios Papathanasiou3 Comments

In a previous post, I presented Airthinx IAQ for Homeowners and how an advanced AQ monitor can be used for indoor environmental monitoring. In this post, we will explore how we can use the same monitor but in business environments (offices, industrial buildings, food supply chains, etc).

We will focus on the tools present in the dashboard as it is one of the best dashboards you will find in the market, and we will learn how to get the most out of it.

Let’s begin with the Dashboard – Home. Here we can create various types of widgets and arrange them according to our preference. First, you can see that I have created a column with all the current measurements with small graphs of the environmental parameters. Right next to it, I always watch for the general AQ, PM2.5, and Humidity. Below I have more widgets with other graphs and values that I want to have a glance.

Dashboard – Home

Next, we can see the Map tab. Here we can locate all the available monitors in a high precision as the monitors come with a GPS module, however, we will see later that we can manually set the location of the device.

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Fitness Air Quality Monitor, is that possible?

Sotirios Papathanasiou5 Comments

Over the years, I have spoken with many companies in the field of air quality and once in a while, companies will tell me that they want athletes to purchase their devices in order to improve performance. I am always skeptical about this because I haven’t seen any integration of fitness data with the AQ monitors so far that could give some possible adverts or ways for the athlete to improve their performance. You don’t expect people to make assumptions you have to give them results and guide them in the right direction.

During covid-19 lockdown, I worked out at home and as I have access to a lot of data (fitness and air quality) I decided to make some experiments and see how my body reacts to poor indoor air quality and good indoor air quality and if the whole hypothesis works.

Smartwatches are very common these day and all of them feature a heart rate monitor and many more sensors. Recently, Apple and Fitbit released pulse oximeter sensors in their latest wearables. These new sensors in the smartwatches could unlock many more potentials and provide us with data that could save lives.

Let’s continue with the argument of what current AQMs could do if they combine fitness data. First of all, there is a possible problem. In case the monitor is stationary then it won’t be able to tell if the user was near the device or not during the workout session but this could be addressed as most times fitness data come along with GPS coordinates. By allowing the device to access the location data only when the user is in the same location as the AQM (home, gym, etc.) we solve the issue. Another possible solution is if the monitor comes with a Bluetooth/Ultra Wideband chip then it can easily sense the presence of the athlete/individual.Read More »