Frying Eggs and Air Quality Tests

Equipment To Test Air at Home!

Disclaimer: this is not an endorsement of any product, just a record of my thinking. Also, none of this is medical advice. Also, be reasonable with what to expect from public spaces and your home behaviour.

I want to start doing more physical experiments. And instrumentation is a big part of that. So I bought a Temtop m2000 air quality monitor that measures CO2 concentration, PM2.5 and PM10 particle concentration, temperature and humidity. I chose this one mainly because it also had data export and time recording. It was £120.

I’m keen to start doing some home experiments with this. The first one I’m planning to do is measuring the air changes per hour of my room with some dry ice as a tracer gas. I also want to do stuff with home made air purifiers, like Corsi-Rosenthal boxes and test if they work as good as people claim them to. I also want to figure out optimal fan placement.

I’m not obsessive about measuring stuff in general, but it was pretty fun to see numbers go up and down on the monitor of this shiny new thang.

First, I checked to see if the CO2 level in my house makes sense. Most standards recommend <= 1000pm in indoor spaces, so this is fine.

Next thing, checking the particle content in my bed room - this looks fine too.

And now for my first mini experiment. Someone once said to me that cooking can increase particle pollution in the air to dangerous levels. Is this true? I suspect not. I fried an egg next to this monitor to find out!

There’s an incredibly small increase but nothing worrying. Here’s the time lapse. PM2.5 peaks at 11 ug / m^3 and then comes down once I stop frying. I’m learning more about air quality guidelines, and from what I’m reading, an average 24hr level below 15 ug / m^3 is fine. Considering cooking only takes half an hour max, it looks like there is basically no danger here from an air quality point of view. Which is great - I love fried eggs.

Something weird though is that turning on my extractor fan didn’t really do much. I need to look into that!