It’s easy to take air for granted, until you can’t breathe. Then you become acutely aware of it’s importance.
In 2022, I was diagnosed with a chronic lung condition. There were signs earlier, but neither I nor my medical professionals put them together until there was a crisis and I ended up in the emergency room. After a 12-day stay in the hospital, I got out and had to make a number of accommodations to my changed life circumstances. Now, I generally isolate, wear an N95 respirator for indoor events, and pay closer attention to air quality.
I was born the same year the Clean Air Act was passed. The air quality in US cities, which had become nearly intolerable and was lampooned and memorialized in comics and cartoons, gradually improved during my childhood. I spent quite a bit of time in Los Angeles during the mid 1980 and you’d hardly notice the haze until the wind changed and you’d realize there were mountains nearby. In other parts of the world, air quality continues to be a problem: I visited Saõ Paulo in 2006 and the air quality was chokingly bad.
I moved to the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts in 1996. The Valley has a tendency to funnel air up from New York City and to trap air creating inversions. The result is that the air quality tends to be worse than you would predict from the bucolic, rural appearance. But it was rarely bad enough to be a concern until we started getting plumes of smoke from wildfires in Canada.
During the last intrusion of wildfire smoke, the air quality was bad enough that I wore my respirator while I was outside. I also pulled out my COVID-era Corsi-Rosenthal boxes and set one up in my office and in my bedroom.
To track the outdoor air quality, I did a bit of investigating and discovered the PurpleAir sensor network. You can buy devices to share air quality readings that can appear on a giant map. I kept a tab open on my computer and watched as the readings on the sensor climbed. There weren’t sensors really close by in Amherst. (Well, there’s one, but it’s an indoor sensor, so it doesn’t tell you very much.) There are two or three by the bridge in Sunderland and one in Hadley and one in South Amherst. Among those, I could interpolate to get a pretty good sense for what the air quality was here. But I found it useful enough, that I decided to buy my own sensor.
I bought the PurpleAir Classic – Air Quality Monitor. It was the only one that wasn’t sold out. (And, as of now, it is sold out.) I didn’t need any of the advanced features that the others had. And this one was marginally cheaper.
It arrived yesterday afternoon. It was not difficult to set up. I’ve installed it out in my tent and zip-tied it to the frame. I have power out there — I’m using an old, old Raspberry Pi power supply I happened to have sitting around. It was fun to have it show up on map and then be able to watch the readings change. There’s even a widget I can install to have it’s readings show up as an embed in my website. (I tried putting one on this page, but it breaks the formatting.)
Now I’m kind of waiting for the next plume of wildfire smoke to come this way so I can watch the number go up. Bring it on!
