Community Air Action: Air quality solutions for homes and communities, and the means to evaluate them
Putting another log on the fire keeps many New Zealanders warm on winter nights. But the smoke it creates pollutes many of our towns, causing regular breaches of environmental standards. The smoke gets everywhere, including inside our homes , even those with clean heat solutions, impacting the health of vulnerable friends and whanau.
So what can be done?
We can reduce our emissions directly with clean heat appliances, or indirectly by adding insulation. Or we can remove smoke from the air using filtration devices on chimneys or inside our homes. Even simple things like adding curtains or being more thoughtful about using windows might make a positive difference.
The key to success is making sure that whatever we do is working. That’s where we come in.
How does Community Air Action work?
We provide monitoring-based technologies that are designed to evaluate air quality solutions that are based in the home or community facility.
Such solutions might include air filtration appliances, changes in solid fuel, chimney filtration, or new heating appliances.
You choose the solution – we can assess how effective it is.
We typically install monitoring sensors in the home for at least a month and compare air quality before and after your solution is implemented.
What if the weather changed? How can we be sure that changes in air quality were really due to the solution applied, and not some other factor? Our innovation is to use the “baseline” data to create a model of how air quality in the home “works”. When the solution is implemented we model what air quality would have been like for the same period and conditions, but without the solution, to make a like-for-like comparison. Read more about the technical details here (when available).
Who can access Community Air Action?
These services have been designed to be part of a community-wide programme, most likely co-ordinated and/or funded through a regional or local council.
However, we a re keen to hear from any community organization or agency with an interest in healthy housing, community development and home energy.
Community Air Action projects can also be tailored for individual householders, property owners and small businesses and facility managers.
What work has Community Air Action done to date, and where?
Community Air Action was developed as a research project during our time at NIWA. To date our focus has been on using indoor air filtration appliances to reduce smoke in homes located in towns where solid fuel burning for home heating is common.
Read about our work reducing woodsmoke in homes in Otago and Southland.
We are keen to expand the places and problems that this approach can be applied to.
Find out more
Blogpost
External media
NIWA video?
