Thailand School sets the AQ bar high – An example to be followed

Sotirios Papathanasiou4 Comments

On Earth, there are over 7 billion people but very few of them have a clear vision of a future and how important air quality is for our health. You will find politicians that are unwilling to enforce air quality laws, you will find educators scared to share with parents the indoor air quality, and you will find lots of people unaware of what they breathe or what they burn.

Among all of them, you will find very few people that want to make things right for the rest. In this case, the Head of School at Prem Tinsulanonda International School in Chiang Mai, Thailand was brave and educated enough to recognize the power of air quality data.

Chiang Mai is a city in exotic Thailand that always ranks in the top polluted cities in the world between March and April. The reason is the burning season. I was taught about the 4 seasons (Spring/Summer/Autumn/Winter) at school but it turns out that they have a fifth season − normally in March and April − when crop waste burning and forest fires fill the air with particles, PM2.5 levels can reach 300 μg/m³.

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Review: Aranet4 HOME – CO2 Monitor [EN/ES/GR]

Sotirios Papathanasiou12 Comments

Impact-Site-Verification: 8822d984-d7e0-4efd-9190-e8b1d8a8a633

(Scroll down for the Spanish or Greek version of the review/Desplácese hacia abajo para la versión en español o Griega/ Μετακινηθείτε προς τα κάτω για την ισπανική ή την ελληνική έκδοση της αξιολόγησης)

English
Español
Ελληνικά

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It is not a coincidence that everywhere you look nowadays you see a small, square, and white monitor with a screen in the middle that displays some numbers! Well, this is Aranet4 which was developed by a Latvian company.

Aranet4 is a small and mighty CO2 monitor that surprise people for two reasons. First of all, it is very comprehensive, and secondly, most people are intrigued by the technology of the display as it uses an e-ink display and, to the untrained eye, looks like a simple sticker.

The commonly found AA batteries can operate the monitor for up to 2 years so you don’t have to worry about them. It uses a single channel non-dispersive infrared (NDIR) sensor technology for accurate CO₂ measurements, read more here.

Specifications

  • Carbon Dioxide (CO2) NDIR
  • Temperature (ºC/ºF)
  • Relative Humidity
  • Atmospheric Pressure
  • e-ink Display
  • Bluetooth
  • Buzzer (Alarm)
  • AA Battery Operated (up to 2 years)
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Episode 2: Athens, Greece – Wood Burning/Fireplaces

Sotirios Papathanasiou6 Comments

Episode 2: Athens, Greece – Wood Burning/Fireplaces – See The Air | Real Life Stories

[EN]This is a bilingual episode. If you want to listen to the Greek version please go to minute 14:52.In this episode, Andrea, who lives in Athens Greece, will share with us his everyday experience with air pollution.The main source of air pollution in his city during winter is wood burning/fireplaces.Andrea tries to educate the Greek community about the dangerous of air pollution on his blog.Website: https://cleanairingreece.org/Twitter: @cleanairgreeceFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/abonettiphoto/Please share and rate this episode with 5 stars.[GR]Αυτό είναι ένα δίγλωσσο επεισόδιο. Εάν θέλετε να ακούσετε την ελληνική έκδοση, πηγαίνετε στα 14 λεπτά και 52 δευτερόλεπτα.Σε αυτό το επεισόδιο, ο Andrea, που ζει στην Αθήνα, θα μοιραστεί μαζί μας την καθημερινή εμπειρία του με την ατμοσφαιρική ρύπανση.Η κύρια πηγή ατμοσφαιρικής ρύπανσης στην πόλη του κατά τη διάρκεια του χειμώνα είναι καύση ξύλου / τζάκια.Ο Andrea προσπαθεί να εκπαιδεύσει την ελληνική κοινότητα σχετικά με την επικινδυνότητα της ατμοσφαιρική ρύπανση στο blog του.Website: https://cleanairingreece.org/Twitter: @cleanairgreeceFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/abonettiphoto/Παρακαλώ μοιράστε και βαθμολογήστε αυτό το επεισόδιο με 5 αστέρια.

[EN]
This is a bilingual episode. If you want to listen to the Greek version please go to minute 14:52.

In this episode, Andrea, who lives in Athens Greece, will share with us his everyday experience with air pollution.
The main source of air pollution in his city during winter is wood burning/fireplaces.
Andrea tries to educate the Greek community about the dangerous of air pollution on his blog.

Website: https://cleanairingreece.org/
Twitter: @cleanairgreece
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/abonettiphoto/

Please share and rate this episode with 5 stars.

[GR]
Αυτό είναι ένα δίγλωσσο επεισόδιο. Εάν θέλετε να ακούσετε την ελληνική έκδοση, πηγαίνετε στα 14 λεπτά και 52 δευτερόλεπτα.

Σε αυτό το επεισόδιο, ο Andrea, που ζει στην Αθήνα, θα μοιραστεί μαζί μας την καθημερινή εμπειρία του με την ατμοσφαιρική ρύπανση.
Η κύρια πηγή ατμοσφαιρικής ρύπανσης στην πόλη του κατά τη διάρκεια του χειμώνα είναι καύση ξύλου / τζάκια.
Ο Andrea προσπαθεί να εκπαιδεύσει την ελληνική κοινότητα σχετικά με την επικινδυνότητα της ατμοσφαιρική ρύπανση στο blog του.

Website: https://cleanairingreece.org/
Twitter: @cleanairgreece
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/abonettiphoto/

Παρακαλώ μοιράστε και βαθμολογήστε αυτό το επεισόδιο με 5 αστέρια.

Review: Piera-7100 by Piera Systems

Sotirios Papathanasiou6 Comments

Recently, I shared an illustration that demonstrates, based on scientific research, how deep pollution particles can go into the human body.

Particulate matter (PM) are basically sneaky and invisible (to the naked eye) particles of various sizes that trigger inflammatory responses all over the human body depending on their size/origin and how deep inside us they can go. They are even able to destroy human tissue when the origin of the particles comes from the combustion of fossil fuel or biomass burning.

The smaller they get the easier it is to enter our bloodstream and affect every cell and organ in our body, even our brain. For this reason, it is very important to start monitoring the unregulated ultrafine particles aka nanoparticles or PM0.1 or UFP.

The IPS7100 by Piera Systems (a Canadian company) is a new generation low-cost laser scattering sensor capable of measuring those ultrafine particles PM0.1 but also fine particles PM0.3/PM0.5/PM1/PM2.5 and coarse particles PM5/PM10. In total, the 7100 series offers 7 output bins.

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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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Podcast Ep1: See The Air | Real Life Stories

Sotirios PapathanasiouLeave a comment

I am very happy to announce that I am launching a new series of Podcast episodes where people from all around the world will be able to share their experience with air pollution and how it affects their lives.

The episodes will be available in all big Podcast distributional channels like Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, and Spreaker.

Episode 1 : London, UK – Traffic Pollution and LTNs

In the first episode, we will hear Ediz from London, UK. Ediz is a clean air campaigner and he and his family members have to breathe lots of traffic-related air pollution as his neighborhood is jammed by hundreds of cars every day.

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Smoggie-PM + Thank you

Sotirios PapathanasiouLeave a comment

Choosing the 5 volunteers was a very difficult task because I had to take into consideration many factors. I wish I had as many monitors as the people (+150) that emailed me. The finalists are from Belgium, Uganda, Azerbaijan, the USA, and Spain.

The second Call for Volunteers was even more successful than the first one and I had the chance to learn from you a little more about the problems of air pollution around the globe and the situation each one of you faces. From Nepal, Poland, Netherlands, Australia, Azerbaijan, India, Romania, Italy, France, Kenya, Belgium, Greece, Denmark, UK, the USA, Finland, Serbia, Mexico, Spain, Israel, Ireland, and many many other places.

I want to THANK YOU all, it really means a lot your offer to raise awareness on such an important problem. I will follow closely the measurements from all 5 locations in order to understand better the impact air pollution has in the communities.

Remember, you can always purchase the inexpensive Smoggie-PM here.

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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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uRADMonitor SMOGGIE-PM | Call for Volunteers Take 2 [Ended]

Sotirios Papathanasiou14 Comments

Back in 2019 uRADMonitor and I organized a “Call for Volunteers” where we gave away 10 monitors all around the world.

Once more we are looking for five volunteers who want to receive a Smoggie-PM monitor. The new version comes with new transparent icy look case and visual indication of the pollution concentration thanks to the LED light.

Volunteers all around the world who are willing to install an Air Quality Monitor in their backyard or balcony or window or any other outdoor environment in order to build a better air quality network and to help you raise awareness in your neighborhood/community.

The only requirement from your side is to have a good Wi-Fi internet connection 24/7 and keep the device on constantly in order to broadcast the measurements to an open map. The WiFi signal must reach the monitor outdoors.

Just email or tweet or DM me on any social media platform, tell me where are you planning to install the monitor and why should I choose you.

What is SMOGGIE-PM?

Smoggie-PM is an ultra low-cost high performance Air Quality Monitor, with Wi-Fi connectivity and a laser scattering sensor (Plantower PMS5003) that measures Particulate Matter PM1, PM2.5 and PM10 and makes it available on your phone or laptop in real time. Also, it is equipped with a Temperature/Humidity/Pressure sensor (Bosch BME280).

Smoggie is an automated, fixed, Air Quality monitoring station. It has WiFi connectivity to send the air quality measurements to the uRADMonitor Cloud in real time. It needs 5V to run, powered by a standard micro-USB cable (the same your smartphone uses in order to charge it). The new versions have a color LED light that reflect the pollution levels in real-time.