Hacker News Reader

Comment by pcmaffey | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have experience with air quality monitors? My home partially burned in a wildfire 3 months ago, and while I have damaged areas sealed off, I’m still not sure how safe the outside air is from the surrounding charred forest. Would love to understand better what’s in the air both indoors and outdoors. But from what I gather, monitoring is not so simple?

View on HN

Depends if you want to build your own or not [1]. If not, I think purpleair is the way to go (I use the same sensor as them but they have two I believe for redundancy). As for air purifier, I highly recommend Blueair. They’re expensive but was the only purifier I had that managed to pull the PM2.5 indoors to near 0 during this terrible wildfire season in California.

[1] https://www.powu3.com/airquality/

Is it really important though, as the only solution is still just HEPA filter. Expensive air filters usually have dust sensors/particle counters in them, so there is some indication when the air is dirty and, you know, anything PM2.5 is harmful either way.

That’s been my thought to date, just investing in air filters instead. We’ve got several. But we’re still not sure whether it’s a good idea to be there at all.

The two maps I use are purple air and AirNow.gov.

https://www.purpleair.com/map https://www.airnow.gov/

I have heard good things about PurpleAir air quality sensors. https://www2.purpleair.com/collections/air-quality-sensors

Reply on news.ycombinator.com