A good quality small sensor air quality monitoring system should last 10 years or more, and of course certified monitoring stations (reference, FRM, FEM) should last much longer.
“How many air quality monitors do I need?” is a question we regularly hear, and the easy responses – “it depends”, “how big is your budget?” – are not very helpful. To give a better idea, it will depend on all these factors.
There’s no doubt that small sensor systems can have an advantage over their cumbersome reference station cousins – in terms of maintenance requirements. We are often asked about ‘service’ requirements for our pods and the honest answer is that the default position, in normal working conditions, is ‘none’. However ..
First of all, you can’t calibrate using bottled gas, as with reference analysers. Even if you can create a chamber or manifold to pump gases through, electrochemical gas sensors do not respond in the same way to single, dry gases as they do to mixed gases in an ambient environment.
We know from our customers that they are often monitoring for a particular air quality project, although some are monitoring on an ongoing basis. So why do they always want to buy equipment rather than rent it?