IAQ & Healthy Homes

Can You Use Consumer IAQ Monitors to Create a Healthier Home?

• 

  Brett Singer

  Staff Scientist
  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
  Berkeley, California
• 

  Linda Wigington

  Principal
  Linda M Wigington & Associates
  Waynesburg, Pennsylvania

For less than $200, you can buy an indoor quality monitor that measures temperature, relative humidity and particulate matter. And for just a bit more you can also get CO2 or VOCs. These devices can interface with smart home systems to activate filtration or ventilation controls. But are the monitors accurate and reliable enough? We will discuss key performance issues and summarize available information from testing done by Berkeley Lab and others. We also will present findings from the ROCIS Low Cost Monitoring Project, which loans equipment to participants for one month so that they can learn about their home, observe how outdoor air and their own activities can impact indoor air quality, and explore opportunities for improvement.

 

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the key performance factors for low-cost sensors to be useful in residential applications
• Learn where to find information about low-cost IAQ monitor performance
• Be able to use low-cost particle monitors to reduce exposure to indoor and outdoor air pollution