We often talk about our outside air quality (especially in California), but we spend 90% of our time indoors, do you know what the indoor air quality is of your office? Your home? Due to poor ventilation practices, our indoor air is up to 8 times more polluted than our outdoor quality! Surprising, isn’t? That’s why indoor HEPA air cleaners are so popular these days.
But does poor indoor air quality really affect our health? Yes it does. According to an article by WebMD, symptoms stemming from poor indoor air quality include coughing, sore throat, itchy eyes, even an asthma attack. The article goes on to quote E. Neil Schachter, Medical Director of Respiratory Care at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York,
“If you live in a home with chronically poor air quality, you can experience frequent headaches, long lasting colds, and bronchitis as well as chronic asthma,”
By clearing the air inside your house, you can greatly diminish these symptoms. Here’s a chart of other symptoms that can be caused by poor indoor air quality…
The problem is, since we can’t see what poor indoor air quality looks like, when do we know to open up our windows to air our home out?
Foobot Checks Your Indoor Air Quality
A cool new product that recently hit the market is Foobot. A funny name, yes, but a powerful ally in helping you combat pollutants in your home. Foobot’s main purpose is to measure your indoor air quality and make the pollution visible.
How? By the LED lights showing on the front of the unit. When Foobot determines that your indoor air quality is good, it’s blue. When it turns orange, you’ll need to turn on your air conditioner or open some windows.
What Foobot Measures
Isn’t Foobot cool? That by a quick glance at Foobot, you immediately know what your indoor air quality is. But what, exactly does it measure?
Particulate matter (PM) – these are fine particles (smaller than 2.5 nanometers in diameter) that are often hard to see. Particulate matter includes dust, pollens, cooking oils, and more, stemming from things like pets, nature, and frying. Dust and unfiltered debris coming from your vacuum cleaner are other major sources. Articles smaller than 2.5 nanometers are dangerous and can settle deep into your lungs or even pass into your bloodstream.
Recommended: The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that people not be exposed to an average concentration higher than 50 µg/m3 over 24h for PM10 and smaller.
Volatile organic compounds (VOC) – VOC’s are gaseous chemicals like formaldehyde (proven as a carcinogen), toluene and ammonia. They come from cleaning products, paints, varnishes, air fresheners, etc. These items can release compounds into the air, making it up to 10 times higher in pollution than the outside. The Foobot sensor will also pick up carbon monoxide, which is also very harmful.
Recommended: You should avoid any peaks higher than 500ppb.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) – CO2 is what we breathe out and what plants give off. Foobot measures CO2 to see if your indoor air quality is compromised. Not because CO2 is necessarily bad for you, but it’s better to have more oxygen than CO2 in the air. An increase in CO2 usually occurs when there are a number of people gathered together, breathing out CO2.
Recommended: Level higher than 1000ppm indicates that the room should be ventilated.
Humidity – shows the percentage of water the current air is holding onto. Usually we look at humidity outside. For example, when it rains, humidity goes up to 100%. If the humidity is too low in your home, it can increase the pollution impact on your body. Symptoms can include dry eyes, dry nose, increase of infections, and itchy skin.
Recommended: Below 60%. Above 60% can lead to mold growth.
Temperature – Temperature is an important component in our daily lives. It influences our comfort and productivity. It also has a main impact on how pollution spreads indoors.
Recommended: 72°F to 76°F in the summer and 70°F in the winter.
Foobot measures a lot of things, doesn’t? All this information is good, but to make it easier to understand, the Foobot app ( App compatibility: Apple iOS 7 and above, Android 4 and above) gives you an average score of all of these variables combined, on the spot. It is this center number that can change Foobot’s LED lights to orange if the indoor air quality is harmful.
Using Foobot
We have been using the Foobot for the past 1 1/2 months. Foobot not only reports on your indoor air quality, but it also learns your indoor air patterns. Once it has detected bad air quality, it turns orange and sends an alert to your phone. It tells you that there has been a pollution event has just started and it asks you to identify what the cause may be.
Our Foobot is generally blue but it turns orange more than I would think. We starting frying our chicken for our orange chicken recipe. Foobot turned orange – and was orange for several hours afterwards.
Cooking
The screenshot above appeared on my app while we were cooking dinner. As you can see, my room’s PM’s weren’t terrible, but its 681 VOC’s were way over the acceptable levels (lower than 500), and they remained at a high level for a couple of hours…even with ventilation.
Generally, when I cook, I turn on the vent fan above the stove. But as soon as I’m done cooking, I usually turn it off. With Foobot, I’ve learned that the harmful particulate matters (PM) from cooking and frying stay in the air much longer than I thought. And I’ll be honest, even though the air is thick sometimes from frying, I’ve never thought much about it.
If the smell gets too strong, I move into another room. But here’s the thing, Foobot can actually measure the indoor air quality of several connected rooms and going into another room still puts me at risk in breathing in PM’s.
Now when I cook on the stove, I immediately open up the windows to let fresh air in. I am more cognizant now of how important it is for our family to breathe fresh air…inside our house!
Cleaning
When we started cleaning our kitchen, I could smell the cleaners everywhere. They were a bit strong, but they eventually dissipated. Well, Foobot wouldn’t stand for it. It immediately turned orange to alert us that we needed to open the windows. Again, something I never did before.
By visiting Foobot blog, you can read about changes you can make to diminish the pollutants in the air while cleaning.
Gathering
I was surprised once during a party we were having to see that Foobot had turned orange. We weren’t cooking anything, so why was it orange? But as I learned how Foobot measures CO2, I realized that we had a lot of carbon dioxide in the room from everyone breathing. There isn’t a need to open the windows right away necessarily, but doing so will help bring in more oxygen into the room.
But is the Outside Air Safe?
The number recommendation to clean out your inside air is to open your windows. But what if the outside air is even worse? How do you know? The makers of Foobot are committed to ensuring you have the best possible information about your local air quality.
To help you assess your outdoor air, they have partnered with BreezoMeter, a company dedicated to continuously gather air quality and weather measurements from thousands of sources and processes it through unique algorithms to give you accurate outdoor air quality…right down to your street level. Check out BreezoMeter’s website for detailed air quality in your area and the Foobot blog for more info.
With the recent update to the Foobot iOS app (and soon for Android), you will now be able to assess with one app what the weather is inside and outside your house. Brilliant!
IFTTT Automation
If you’re familiar with the IFTTT website, IFTTT stands for If This, Than That. It’s a free website that uses the Internet and a “recipe” to connect things. Foobot is IFTTT compatible, so you can add recipes to help you keep track of your Foobot readings. For example, you can have use IFTTT to automatically transfer your indoor air quality average to a Google spreadsheet.
Or, if you have a Hue lightbulb, you can have the IFTTT recipe flash the light bulb to alert you of a pollution event occurring. That’s the beauty of the Internet of Connected Things – they are finally beginning to speak together.
Foobot is available through the Foobot website for $199, including free shipping.
A Mom’s Perspective
According to the World Heath Organization (WHO), studies show that every year there are four million deaths due to indoor air pollution, that’s 4 million! Asthma is a leading cause stimulated by poor indoor air quality. Wow.
I have been surprised sometimes when Foobot turns orange (I keep it in the kitchen) during just simple things I have cooked. Because we can’t see it, we don’t think about opening the windows and ventilating the house.
Foobot changes all that. It works day and night to keep track of our indoor air quality and alerts me via its color and via my cellphone when it has encountered a pollution event. It also keeps a graph of readings for me right in the app.
Foobot makes invisible air quality visible and it has literally changed the way I ventilate our house.
The kids all know when Foobot is upset with the air. And that’s a part of the beauty. Now, my kids and I are opening windows and being more cautious – it’s a family effort. And guess what? Everyday, my kids are learning about the importance of good indoor air quality. They are being trained by Foobot and it will make them more cognizant of how important it is to not breathe in harmful fumes from cooking, cleaning, personal hair care, painting, spray painting, and more when they move out on their own.
Are you having long lasting colds, an itchy throat, or headaches? It could be your indoor air quality. Foobot can help.
* I was given a Foobot for purposes of review and evaluating our own indoor air quality. All opinions are my own.
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Thanks for the post. I agree that opening the windows can be a very effective way to clean out your homes air, but like you said what if the outside air is even worse. I think it is so important to make sure that your heating or cooling systems filter is the right one and right size. I think that can help to make a dramatic increase in the air quality. I also like the idea to take measurements in your home to see how bad the air is.