SO WE CAN ALL BREATHE EASIER
New technology is helping homeowners maintain air quality, Mark Wessel writes.
When Switzerland-based technology company IQ Air released its sixth annual World Air
Quality Report in March, it was alarming enough to learn that only seven out of 134 countries monitored actually met the World Health Organization's (WHO) air quality standards.
And further cause for concern was the fact that despite our global image as a land of wilderness and the great outdoors, Canada wasn't part of that particular group of seven.
In fact for the first time, Canada's air quality was worse than the United States — more than double the PM 2.5 levels (particulate matter produced by smoke and other pollution sources) deemed safe by the WHO. As shared by IQ Air, the 2023 wildfires played a significant role in all of this. It was the kind of record year no country would want to live through, with over 6,000 wildfires destroying 16.5 million hectares of land, according to Natural Resources Canada.
Despite global warming, one would hope that our wildfire situation couldn't get any worse in 2024. And yet in a recent CBC interview, University of Waterloo professor Amy Li advised that this year's wildfire season has already begun and residents everywhere (including southern Ontario) need to be prepared by taking two important steps.
One, make sure your HVAC system is equipped with high efficiency filters; and two, “consider purchasing portable air filters that are an appropriate size for the space you want to clean.”
Due to air quality concerns for our home, tied not just to the increasing frequency of forest fires, but also living in a neighbourhood surrounded by people burning everything from wood stoves to outdoor fires, we started down this path some time ago.
At first we used a portable air quality monitor which quickly made us realize that we needed to look into Li's first recommendation of purchasing a superior air filter for our furnace. So we ended up buying and installing filters rated MERV 13, which is capable of capturing fine particulate pollution.
But we found that we still had smoke leaching into our home during times of heavy burning, whether through our air exchange system or when opening and closing our doors, which ultimately led us to decide to follow Li's second piece of advice and not only get serious about monitoring smoke and air quality indoors, but to take concrete steps to address indoor air quality issues.
Which brings us back to IQ Air. Further research made it clear to me that while there are companies that produce air quality monitoring equipment (but not many for the home), there are plenty of air filtration companies, but very few that do both, as in the case of IQ Air.
What I found truly impressive about this company is they really do have a global perspective on air quality, to the extent that the findings of the IQ Air annual report are linked to 30,000 air monitoring stations scattered across the globe in (as previously mentioned) 134 countries.
So recently, we took the next step and installed indoor and outdoor IQ Air monitors as well as one of the company's Healthpro 250 air filter — a unit capable of removing (according to their literature) 99.9 per cent of airborne particulate matter, as well as other gas and odours. A whole room unit about the size of a portable air conditioner or fan that will serve as the first line of defence for our ground floor, which is where most of the outdoor smoke we are exposed to seeps in.
Although still in the early stages, among my first impressions are the fact that: the downloadable app called Airvisual gives you a real-time reading of air quality tied both to the indoor and outdoor devices; you can then compare air quality inside and out, which in turn can tell you when it makes sense to open a window or door (e.g. open a window or two if you're experiencing indoor pollution caused by cooking); and when you really shouldn't open that window or door (e.g. when the neighbour's wood-burning stove is going and there's a significant drop in outdoor air quality).
That information, in turn, enables us to decide when to crank up the ground floor air filter in order to capture that pollution as quickly as possible. We are also now part of IQ Air's international air monitoring network and we hope to share that data not only with our neighbours — many of whom air quality may not be top of mind and eventually, with local politicians, in order to get them seriously thinking about doing what their peers in cities like Montreal have already done and banning fire burning altogether so that we can all breathe a littler easier.