Air Pollution Monitor (Purple Air)
Published Monday September 30, 2013: Updated October 29, 2021
In Utah, each county has an air pollution monitor that takes hourly readings and reports back the amount of particulates there are in the air as well as ozone concentrations.
While these sensors are fine and good, sometimes they are broken or don’t report back data for days at a time.
Even if every one of these sensors worked perfectly all the time, there is only a hand full of them and that doesn’t paint a very high resolution picture of how clean the air really is.
It’s kind of like looking at a photo of the entire state of Utah that is only 7 pixels. You get an accurate picture in the vicinity around each air sensor but 100 feet away, the air could be something else entirely different.
What we need is a vast array of air quality sensors, at least 40 times as many.
Enter Purple Air:
Adrian Dybwad founded a company that makes low cost air quality sensors. These have been deployed around the world with the largest concentration of them along the Wasatch front. While they are not as precise as a more expensive air quality sensor, they are able to report data every few seconds instead of every hour . Each sensor actually has redundant sensors inside and the final reading is based on an algorithm of the two sensors.
Each Purple air
sensor automatically reports its data and is projected onto an on-line map. Using the whole collection of air quality sensors, you can at-a- glance get a better picture of the air quality in your city and know what neighborhoods have healthy air and which ones don’t.
Wanting to know what the air in my literal backyard is doing, I bought and installed my own PurpleAir monitor.
Initially I set up the sensor inside the house just to make sure it was working. On that day, the outdoor air quality was very poor along the Wasatch front, (above 150 for PM2.5). However, inside my home the air quality sensor was reading only 1 for PM2.5. Wow really? Just 1 for PM2.5? That is really clean air inside the house. Thanks to the MERV 13 air filter in our ground loop heatpump, we are breathing very clean, healthy air.
At first I didn’t believe this reading. But then I moved the sensor outside and after giving it a few minutes to acclimatize, its reading was comparable to a Purple air sensor a few miles away and the official government, air quality station 10 miles away.
Here is a snapshot of the air quality along the Wasatch Front on 3-26-2018. It was just after a snow storm and the air is surprisingly clean.
It’s amazing that by just tracking air quality over time, I can infer with almost certain accuracy when all the parents are zipping by, shuttling their kids to school in the morning, or when the local church goers are whizzing past, rushing in their vehicles to get to church. Both of these activities temporally elevate the pollution levels in the air by my house for about 10 minutes.
While the medical harm of breathing the air outside during a bad air day, (PM2.5 levels above 120), is equivalent to taking a couple drags on a single cigarette, it’s good to know when it is best to avoid going outside.
One night a few months ago we built a fire in the backyard and roasted hot-dogs and marshmallows. Out of curiosity I pulled up the air quality monitor on the PurpleAir website. The air quality in our backyard spiked from single digits to over 154 for PM2.5. Wow, who knew that a friendly backyard fire was so polluting?
Maybe if more people get these monitors we can raise awareness of the poor air quality in our valley and finally convince the legislatures of our state to do something about it.
Ways to reduce air pollution:
- Make public transportation free on bad air days, or during bad inversion seasons when air pollution gets trapped in the valley for weeks at a time.
- Forbid gasoline refineries and other polluting industries operating in the valley to operate whenever the local air quality exceeds 50 for PM2.5.
- Just quit the nasty habit all together, get off of the gasoline teat and only drive electric cars. If everyone did this, it would eliminate over 50% of our local air pollution.
Updated 10/29/2021: During the height of COVID in 2020, everyone was locked down and all large public gatherings were canceled.
Since all the firework shows were also canceled, every family in the US cashed in their Donald Trump stimulus checks and blew it all on fireworks. For a solid 4-hours on the evening of July 4th, every neighborhood in the USA was blowing shit up.
It was total chaos. Pets were freaking out and veteran PTSD was on high alert.
Air quality across the entire United States spiked into the Purple. Murika!!!
