Fireplace, indoor pollution and measurements
In the October, the main module of the stratospheric probe software, used at the Probe-01, has been expanded to operate with few additional sensors including air quality sensor, the Sensirion SPS30.
The goal was to measure the air quality distribution along with the altitude during the winter time. The flight was planned from Wrocław, which is famous for bad air quality during the winter time. By the way, this year on the 18th of January in the morning Wrocław was a number one in the world in this category [3].
Unfortunately, because of COVID-19 and its aftermaths we decided to temporarily suspend the new flights. Fortunately, however, the air quality sensor and the newly developed software were ready for use. The winter has come, because of frost I started using the fireplace and reminded myself, that many years ago someone told me, that using fireplace is strongly not recommended for allergy sufferers because of the smoke and forcing high air convection and thus plenty of flying dust particles. I decided to verify this hypothesis.
Last Sunday I run the test. The indoor air quality before starting the fireplace was very good, i.e. 8µm/m3 for PM1.0, PM2.5, PM4.0 and PM10. According to official Polish norm [2] the air quality is treated as very good when the level of pollution is less than or equal to 20µm/m3 for PM10 and less than or equal to 13µm/m3 for PM2.5 particles.
The outcomes depicted below, gathered during 16 hours of measurements, encompasses firing-up phase, proper operation (heating) with periodic fuel addition and a natural extinguishing phase in the early-morning hours.
Surprisingly, during the whole test, the air quality was very good or good. The test started at 14:00, when the fireplace was fired-up. Next half an hour it was a heating-up phase and at 16:00 I needed to add some fuel. Unfortunately, some little amount of smoke went out, which is visible on the charts. However, in terms of PM10 the air quality was still very good, in terms of PM2.5, the quality dropped to good for the time of one hour.
Before every next adding of fuel phase the fireplace was additionally heated by opening all the valves for more than dozen of seconds and the door was opened carefully. The effect? For the rest of the time the air quality in the room was very good, with slight deviations only, including one visible on the chart during last adding the fuel just after the midnight.
Obviously, the quality of the sensor used in the experiment can be questioned, however, another test showed that the sensor returned values at level of a several dozen of thousands when it was blown with smoke originated from a match being extinguished.
Summarizing… the fireplace is not as harmful as it is told. When properly operated, it can be very useful, and be a romantic addition to the living room. This small research was also a test of modernized stratospheric probe software and the sensor itself. I hope, next time I use it in real flight mission.
References:
- Own research conducted on February 7th, 2021 in Kąty Wrocławskie city, Poland.
- http://powietrze.gios.gov.pl/pjp/content/health_informations/#
- https://wroclife.pl/nasze-miasto/najbardziej-zanieczyszczone-miasta-na-swiecie/