Monitoring my home's air quality with AirGradient's DIY sensor
After getting a (non-DIY because as much as I like hobby electronics I have a tendency to scope creep my little projects straight into incompletion) about a year ago, my main learnings have been:<p>- Cooking is insanely bad for the air in your house, even with an outside-venting hood. Any sort of medium-high heat cooking will spike the PM2.5 to multiple times that of the haziest days here in NYC, and with the windows shut it will stay elevated for hours after.<p>- The 20" box fan + MERV furnace filter hack is super effective for cutting down on the PM. A few days this July the wildfire smoke from the west coast settled on NYC and we had 40-70 ug/m3 PM2.5 outside. The box fan filter took it down to around 5 in a matter of minutes. I didn't even bother taping the filter to the fan.<p>- My A/C system's ability to precisely hold the temperature within fractions of a degree of the thermostat setting is impressive.<p>- With two people working from home in an old, unventilated-but-kinda-drafty ~700 square foot apartment, the only thing that gets the CO2 levels into "drowsy" territory (my original point of curiosity when buying the sensor) is running the gas oven for a while.