Healthy Indoors Magazine - USA Edition

HI Dec 2017

Healthy Indoors Magazine

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Healthy Indoors | 25 The Energy Smart IAQ Framework Good solutions require awareness, understanding, and action. Solution failure can be attributed to a weakness of awareness, understanding, or action. This is the frame- work I'm going to rank these devices on. Let's briefly look at the three elements, then dig into each one. • Awareness — What's measured can get managed. The right sensors are needed to measure the most important air quality factors so that they can be man- aged. It may seem obvious, but it's worth mentioning that good calibration is important; the sensors need to be fairly accurate and not prone to wild reading swings. • Understanding — The best IAQ monitor needs to have a good mobile and/or web app to help you build informed intuition about your specific sittion. You need to see and make sense of patterns. When do peaks and valleys occur? What causes them? Good visualization is key, which means software reigns supreme. A good email tutorial and phone notifications are nice bonuses. • Action — Knowledge without action is useless. These sensors ultimately need to drive you to take actions and/or control devices that lower indoor air pollution. The best IAQ monitors help teach you what matters and fix what matters by measuring what matters. The Players I limited the review to devices that do datalogging, or mea- suring and recording data over time. This is a major attribute that distinguishes this new class of IAQ monitors. Without datalogging it's difficult to understand changes over time. Back row left to right: Foobot — A tall white box with blue lights for good IAQ, orange for poor; measures PM2.5, VOCs, temperature, and relative humidity. Awair — A beautiful wood box with 5 bar charts and a numerical reading; measures PM2.5, VOCs, carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), tempera- ture, and humidity. Speck — A slightly odd shaped white box with a useful touch screen and a graph of the last hour and 24 hours; measures PM2.5, and on the web app, also temperature and humidity. NetAtMo — A thin metal cylinder, with a smaller battery powered cyl- inder for outdoors; measures CO 2 , temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and noise in decibels (dB). A button on the top controls lights that indicate air quality. Air Mentor 6 in 1 — A triangle shaped white box; measures PM10, PM2.5, VOCs, CO 2 , temperature, and humidity. A slowly flashing light indicates IAQ by color. Dylos DC1100 Pro — A black box; measures PM2.5 and PM0.5 (smaller particles), which are shown on the display. Front row left to right: Corentium Home 223 Radon Gas Detector — Measures radon giv- ing a long term, 7 day, and 1 day average. No data logging, so not part of this review. CO Experts — Not reviewed because of single factor and no data- logging; a good low level carbon monoxide monitor. AcuRite 00613A1 — A small black box; measures temperature and humidity. A great starter unit for about $10, but no app or datalogging, so not part of the review. Speck — A second unit. Hobo MX1101 — Not pictured. A very small white box; measures temperature and humidity.

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