It’s allergy season again. Spring is here, and the catkin white fluff is in the air! Lately, I’ve noticed many people wearing these Pitta masks out on the streets of Beijing. They look sleek, but I wondered whether they actually work. After all, data shows that Japan’s air quality is much better than China’s, so it’s possible that they were designed for things other than […]
Tag: review
What is the best air purifier on the market today?
I started thinking about this question a lot because I was living in Beijing, and the “airpocalypse” struck: I had a cough I couldn’t shake for weeks, so I started doing research into air purifiers. Unlike another answer here, I wasn’t concerned about allergens like pollen. I was concerned about the very small particles […]
How Accurate is the Huawei Air Quality Monitor? New Test!
When I started building DIY air purifiers in Beijing to protect my lungs from this… …I wanted to test the air in my home, but particle counters were really expensive. Most cost around $1,000 or $2,000 dollars. But then there was the Dylos, which I bought for about $260. […]
Is the Laser Egg only accurate in Beijing?
A few months ago, Smart Air tested the Laser Egg, the Node, and the Dylos against official PM2.5 readings. The results were way better than I expected! All three machines correlated r = .90 or higher with the gold-standard numbers, which is very high. But this test may have exaggerated their accuracy. See, the Laser […]
Xiaomi Mi 2 Auto Mode Leaves Air Unsafe for 86% of hours | Review
Ever since I coughed through a Beijing airpocalypse, I’ve been saying clean air doesn’t need to cost an arm and a leg. I set up the social enterprise Smart Air to put out open-source data on purifiers and provide low-cost purifiers to people in places like China and India based on that data. So when the […]
The Really Small Stuff
To test how effective the DIY filter is, I’ve been posting lots of data on 2.5 micron particles. But my particle counter also measures smaller 0.5 micron particles, and I’ve been looking closely at that lately. Remember that the “PM2.5” you hear in the news is different from the numbers on most particle counters. […]