Published on January 22, 2025 3:20 AM GMT
I make breakfast for the kids most mornings, and one thing I didn'trealize before I started playing with an air quality monitor was howmuch this puts smoke in the air. It's not like cooking Naan orsearing meat where if I don't put a fan in the window the smoke alarmwill go off, but apparently it's quite a lot of particles:
While I initially gotinterested in air quality from an infection reduction perspective,I'd also prefer not to be breathing smoke. How much does an airpurifier help? What about opening a window? Running the little ventfan over the stove that doesn't seem to do anything?
I decided to run some tests. In each case I'd set up my M2000in the kitchen and start cooking breakfast for the kids. Forconsistency, I only did this on days when I was making the most commonoption: crepes. While it would have been best to try each condition afew times to learn what sort of variability there was, I wasn't thatpatient.
The conditions I tested were:
Control: no attempt made to reduce smoke.
Over-stove Vent: turning on the vent fan on our over-stovemicrowave. It doesn't vent outside, and it doesn't seem to have anysort of fine filter that could catch little particles, but possibly itdoes something?
Open Window: opening a window. I didn't put a fan in thewindow or anything. This is the one I'd expect to have the mostvariability in practice since there should be a big difference betweena more windy and less windy day. I don't remember how windy it waswhen I tested this.
1x AP-1512 (auto): a Coway AP-1512 purifieron the "auto" setting. It runs on "low" most of the time, and thenramps up to "medium" and then "high" when it detects particles. For along time we had one of these on top of our fridge.
1x AP-1512 (high): same, but set full-time to "high". This isn'tsomething we'd normally do because it was too noisy, but I was curioushow much of an effect it had. I ended up analyzing the data in a waythat wouldn't capture this benefit, though.
2x AP-1512 (auto): two of the AP-1512 purifiers, both on"auto". Until recently this is what we had in our kitchen.
2x AP-1512 (auto) + Over-stove Vent: the same, but also turningon the over-stove vent.
2x AP-1512 (auto) + 1x 3Pro (6): instead of the vent, turningon the Airfanta3Pro I mounted in thekitchen. I ran the 3Pro on its highest setting, representing whatwe usually do: when we hear the AP-1512 spin up to high, we bump the3Pro from it's normal quiet2/6 up to 6/6. This is our current kitchen setup.
While I liked the idea of cooking the same breakfast each time, itdidn't make a consistent amount of smoke. Some days I let the pan geta little hotter, sometimes I would forget a crepe in the pan, etc.What should be comparable, though, is the rate at which smokeparticles decreased. This should be a process of exponential decay:every minute a consistent fraction of the particles should make theirway out the doors into other parts of the house, settle out of theair, be caught in a filter, etc.
I wrote somecode, with a significant LLMspeedup, to plot the decay I saw in each case. For each example Istarted estimating after the peak when it seemed be entering itsexponential decay phase, and then stopped counting when it fell below50ug/m3:
Since this is exponential decay, however, a logarithmic y-axis betterallows us to judge how good the model is:
Conclusions:
The over-stove vent was essentially useless. I think thebenefit we saw was probably due to slightly accelerating the transferof air between rooms, but since there are also people in the otherrooms this isn't a real benefit.
Opening the window helped much less than I expected. Beforerunning this I thought that the window was great, except for theamount of heat you lose to (or in the summer receive from) theenvironment. But at least without putting the fan in the window itonly cuts the time about in half,.
Adding a single air purifier is a big improvement. Looking atthese charts, I probably wouldn't bother getting more than one: a halflife of four minutes is pretty good.
The second air purifier didn't help much. I don'tknow how much of this is noise from test to test, and how much is thatI put them right next to each other (on top of the fridge) instead ofthe more ideal situation of opposite sides of the room.
Adding the 3Pro helped a lot, probably because it's almosttwice as powerful as the AP-1512.
One benefit I'm not capturing here is what happens during thetime when you're producing smoke: can your purifiers keep upwith it, or are they playing catch-up? This isn't really something Iwas set up to measure, since I couldn't generate a consistent initialburst of smoke, but eyeballing the results they do look to be in theexpected direction.
I did most of this work when Lily was asking for crepes all the time,but aside from what I'm guessing was a one-off this morning that's notwhat she wants these days. If at some point she changes her mind, I'dlike to test:
A fan in the window pointing out.
That, plus opening a kitchen window.
That, but a dining room window instead.
The 3Pro alone.
The main scenarios above, again, to measure consistency.
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