Clean Air Eastbourne is a citizen science project that builds low cost air pollution monitors that help map the quality of the town's air in real time.
The air pollution monitors we help Eastbourne residents build are part of the Sensor Community (formerly Luftdaten) network. These help map the air quality locally, and around the world.
61 people a year die in Eastbourne from particulate air pollution according to Public Health England.
The World Health Organisation reported that Eastbourne residents exceed their recommended exposure limits for both PM10 and PM2.5.
Eastbourne deserves clean air.
The air quality monitoring devices we build are called Airrohr, and originate from the Sensor Community (formerly Luftdaten) project in Germany who shared their full construction manual for free.
We try to simplify their process by doing some of the hard work for you such as sourcing the parts and preinstalling the software.
You will need to provide a WiFi internet connection, a USB power supply (such as a phone charger or wall socket), and somewhere within 3 meters of the power supply to place the device.
Once the device has been built, the videos below should explain how to connect your air quality monitor to your WiFi network.
This video shows how to configure a recent device using an iPhone.
This video shows how to configure an older device using a Mac laptop.
Once connected to your WiFi network, you just need to check the device is working. Give it 10 minutes, then visit the madavi website. Search for your sensor ID on the page and click. If it's working, you should have some graphs starting to be drawn. We normally write down the sensor ID and stick it inside the sensor if we built it for you.
The final step is to register the device on https://devices.sensor.community/. You will need to create an account there first, and also give your location. This enables your device to appear on the map.
When placing the device outside, we recommend you do so away from any known emission source such as a boiler exhaust flue.
The pollutants in the air we breathe come from a range of various sources. There are man made sources such as transport, domestic heating, bonfires, industry, and agriculture, as also natural sources such as dust and sea salt.
The main pollutants you'll hear about in our air are particulate matter, and gases such as NOx, Ozone, and Carbon Monoxide.
NOx is a combination of Nitrogen Monoxide (NO) and Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2). NO2 is volatile, but plays a role in the formation of particulate matter pollutants.
Particulate matter can essentially be thought of as fine dust. We inhale it, and it can penetrate deep into our lungs and enter our blood stream. The smaller the particules, the more damage it is thought to do.
There are three commonly refered to sizes, PM10, PM2.5, and PM1. PM10 is the largest at 10 microns in size, PM2.5 is 2.5 microns, and PM1 is 1 micron in size. PM2.5 is a subset of PM10, and PM1 is a subset of PM2.5. To give you an idea of scale, a human hair is approximately 60 microns thick.