News

Did you know that we have always been part of wider group of companies, offering a portfolio of emissions, leak detection and gas stream monitoring products, software and services, specialising in methane?

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 ..

Our pods continue to be pretty popular among environmental and engineering consultancies, both here in the UK and further afield, so we asked some of them what appeals to them most about AQMesh. We were pleasantly surprised by the range of responses we received although there were a number of recurring themes.

We have some thoughts here at AQMesh about the common features of successful, well-run small sensor air quality monitoring projects. This is our list, but we’d love to hear your ideas.

Is it normal to get excited about a Publicly Available Standard? For us it feels like a long time coming, and this first step on the long road towards an ISO standard for small sensor air quality monitoring is very welcome.

We installed an AQMesh pod on a rural road to see the impact of local road closures and increased traffic but we left it in place and have been able to monitor how the air quality changes from autumn to winter. This time covered changing traffic patterns, wood-burning, bonfire night, the Christmas break and then no traffic, with the road closed by floods. So, what did we see?

Everyone loves holidays, whether Christmas or anything else, right? So what’s special about ‘air quality’ people? What we get so excited about are ‘free’ experiments, where distinct changes in activity help to peel away the layers of air pollution measured.

Hyperlocal air quality monitoring promises to fill in the gaps between sparse reference stations – great, lots more measurements. And each of your lovely small sensor monitoring stations can measure a dozen or more pollutants and environmental conditions – even better. Or is it?

This a great report, full of common sense and helpful advice, applicable globally, particularly where air quality monitoring is currently limited. Limited by budgets, logistics, and many factors discussed so eloquently at the ASIC Ghana conference last month. 

Generally, the limiting factor will be budget. The clue is in the name with hyperlocal air quality monitoring, and pollution levels can vary hugely over short distances. NO measurements around streets, for example, are often significantly different from one side of the road to the other, particularly if there isn’t much wind and/or a street canyon effect.

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.

Watching the ASIC Ghana conference presentations, it is striking that the same issues come up, whether monitoring in Africa, Europe or America. Many of the challenges relate to boring logistics: where to position measurement units and how to get power to the chosen location.

We know from our customers that they are often monitoring for a particular project, although some are monitoring on an ongoing basis. So why do they always want to buy equipment rather than rent it?