Smart Home Air Quality System

By: Ian Longley

-What’s the Issue?

The air in your home can be contaminated from both outside and within. It may be smoke from wood-fires, rural burning, or bushfires. It might be dust or chemicals from industry, or particulates from trucks. But it could also be viruses, excess moisture encouraging mold, or chemicals from building materials, furnishings, or solvents.

In some cases, you need to ventilate more. In others, you need to ventilate less. How are you supposed to know what to do and when?

We Have the Tools, We Just Need the Smarts

The means to improve indoor air quality are available but rarely used properly. Relatively inexpensive ventilation fans and air filtration appliances are readily available and were proven highly effective during COVID-19 when used smartly. To be smart, they need to be partnered with air quality sensors, which are also increasingly available. Crucially, they need to be combined using a system smart enough to detect where the problem is coming from and select the right solution – whether it be more or less ventilation or filtration.

At The Air Quality Collective, we are busy building the Smart Home Air Quality System. The System aims to:

  • Work towards goals you set (you can prioritize impact, noise, or energy conservation)
  • Address the specific air quality problems you are dealing with, no matter how complex
  • Evaluate the impact it’s having, sharing the results with you, so that you and the system learn together

Get Involved – Help Us Evaluate Our Prototype Systems

We are looking for householders who would like to test-drive our prototypes. Current opportunities are available in Alexandra and Clyde (Otago). If you are interested, please fill in our online Expression of Interest form.

Further opportunities may become available soon.

Find Out More

Making screening of smaller towns easy – like Woodville

Making screening of smaller towns easy – like Woodville

By Ian Longley Outside our major centres, New Zealand is a country of many small towns separated by long drives. The harder somewhere is to get to, the more likely it is tucked away in a valley or basin, and the more likely it is to rely on wood for home heating. How...

AirGrid: Sensor grids to map airborne particulate matter across towns and cities

AirGrid: Sensor grids to map airborne particulate matter across towns and cities

By: Ian Longley To create a map of air quality across a town or city you used to have spend significant resources setting up and maintaining a sparse air quality monitoring network and then apply uncertain models which rely on emissions data you don’t usually have....

Mapping traffic pollution: Using cheap samplers and semi-empirical modelling to gain insight into how urban planning and design impacts exposure

Mapping traffic pollution: Using cheap samplers and semi-empirical modelling to gain insight into how urban planning and design impacts exposure

By: Ian Longley The degree to which road traffic pollutes urban air varies hugely, depending how much traffic is nearby. We’ve been mapping traffic pollution in detail across all New Zealand’s towns and cities over the last decade. In doing so we’ve been refining the...