Is US air quality ever as bad as in Shanghai? (photos)
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Is US air quality ever as bad as in Shanghai? (photos)
If you're new here, you may want to first register and subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! Yet another evening of bad Los Angeles air quality We won’t bore our readers by pointing out that last night [January 29, 2014] was yet another “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups” bad air quality day in Los Angeles. (Sensitive Groups includes those athletically inclined.) You can read about the trials and tribulations of our air purifiers from previous days this week and this month. “Lower your standards!” We had a comment exchange on a social media site with someone in Shanghai regarding China’s consideration of spraying water from skyscrapers. China hopes this can bring PM2.5 down to 35 micrograms per cubic meter. We point out this is at the US 24-hour average but still way above the US annual average exposure limit (but below where it has sometimes been in Los Angeles recently).… Read the restCreative Solutions to Air Quality
A positive blog One of our vendors (not one of our readers, apparently) complained recently that air quality and air pollution were less than upbeat topics. That’s the traditional ostrich mind set. “Oh air quality, nothing can be done.” We beg to differ. We’ve done many blog articles about how you can use our free app and simple technologies to control your indoor air quality and fight air pollution. But the news has filled recently with stories about how new technologies finding solutions to air pollution. For example, China is considering experimenting with new technologies to spray water from skyscrapers to bring PM 2.5 air pollution levels down to a somewhat safer 35 micograms per m3. (PM 2.5 levels were recently above that level here in Los Angeles on multiple days so maybe we should be spraying water from our downtown skyscrappers out here as well if it would help. Los Angeles is a large geographic area, however, and one wonders how effective spraying in downtown would be.)… Read the restDr. Beak From Rome and the Black Plague, or why having a surgical mask might be handy
This 1656 woodcut (see photo) depicts the plague doctor “Dr. Beak from Rome” (“Doktor Schnabel von Rom”). His bird mask was stuffed with straw, which served as a crude air filter. Medieval artists alternated lampooned him (as here) and later celebrated him as scientific and practical methods of plague control slowly proved themselves over the more superstitious practices of that era. When we got into this we were thinking about how smart homes (and smarter air purification) could reduce dust buildup in our more dusty urban areas (like urban California, Europe, and Asia). While it was obvious there was a lot of dust buildup on furniture, we didn’t realize just how badly air quality fluctuated from day-to-day here. Bird Flu or just poor air quality Earlier this week one of our staff members saw someone walking the streets of Los Angeles with a surgical mask on. He appeared to be from a part of Asia that had experience with bird flu, and wearing surgical masks on the street is more culturally accept there than here.… Read the restBad pollen day in your town? Tech recommendations.
Weather Channel pushes pollen advisories that might cause sneezing, but not PM2.5 EPA action days that might increase cancer risk? Today [January 25, 2014] the Weather Channel app pushed out a pollen advisory for Los Angeles. We’ve had their app installed for at least a year, and this is first time we’ve seen that push notification. (There was also a high surf advisory today for Los Angeles. Some of you may be wondering if we also got a polar vortex advisory out here; no we didn’t.) Mind you, pollen advisory went along with an EPA “Moderate” PM2.5 warning. That’s still above the World Health Organization’s PM2.5 dust average annual exposure limit guideline, but it’s not the “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups” (Sensitive Groups including those athletically inclinded) and it wasn’t a PM2.5 concentration of 40 micrograms per cubic meter, waaaay above the 24 microgram WHO 24-hour average guideline, and even above the 35 microgram limit by the EPA and several other countries that we had two days ago out here.… Read the restWhy big city fitness gyms need to install clean air tech.
Third article in half a month on “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups” bad LA air days Yet another bad air day in Los Angeles last night (see app screenshot) [originally published Jan 23, 2014]. We’ve now done three articles on ‘Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups’ bad air days in Los Angeles due to the Colby Fire and random automobile pollution just in the month of January alone. Incidentally, those “sensitive groups” involve working out at the fitness gym, which we’ll talk a bit more about in a bit. Despite a serious air purifier, our indoor PM2.5 dust particle counts on our Laser Particle Counter spiked around 10:30 PM Pacific Time yesterday, so we knew something was up. Running the numbers through our free app, they were starting to get bad. The EPA was still showing PM2.5 levels in the area as “moderate”, but EPA data is weighted average of 4-hour and 24-hour data (it sort of has to be), so it is delayed.… Read the restRecent Comments
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