Monitoring Indoor Air Quality at Home

Do you know what’s in your home’s air?

The holiday season is in full swing.  With cooler temperatures and shorter days, we are spending more time indoors and for many we are once again spending the holidays with family and friends for the first time since 2019.  Now is the perfect time to begin understanding how activities within your home impact your indoor air quality.  Our home’s indoor air quality has gained attention the past 2 years as the pandemic has highlighted the need for building ventilation, and we spent more time packed into our homes working and learning remotely.

Studies show we spend nearly 90% of our time indoors.  Now that time is more heavily focused at home, a space which has been generally overlooked for ventilation and air quality monitoring, you may be wondering how your home’s air impacts you. But do not fret. Getting to understand your home’s air quality is a fairly inexpensive and easy journey to begin. Over the next month we will review a variety of air quality monitoring and control devices currently available for the home market.  We will break these devices into 3 categories:

1.) Inexpensive entries ( IKEA & Amazon)

2.) Full-range monitoring (AirThings and Awair)

3.) Monitoring + Control (Broan Overture)

Through these upcoming posts, we will share our own first hand experience utilizing the various monitoring devices in our home, explain the benefits and limitations of each approach, and demonstrate how the devices report various typical household activities.  And the best part, the market now offers products for all budgets, beginning at just $12.  We can’t wait to kick the series off next week when we share the first IAQ monitoring device we implemented, AirThings.