The Complete Handbook of Air Quality Meters

Chapter 1: Understanding Air Quality Meters

An air quality meter is, at its core, a tool that quantifies the presence of specific pollutants in the air you are examining. That definition is deliberately narrow because the word "air quality" is often treated as a single, universally understood concept when it is anything but. What you are actually measuring, and what the meter is designed to detect, radically changes what you are buying, how you interpret results, and where you place the device. There is no single instrument that measures "air quality" comprehensively. There are meters for particulate matter, meters for carbon dioxide, meters for volatile organic compounds, meters for carbon monoxide, and combinations of these modules in a single housing. Your job as the user is to know which stream of data matters for your purpose.

Consider a concrete example. A facility manager responsible for a commercial office building gets an employee complaint about "bad air" and decides to purchase a desktop air quality monitor. The device he buys reads relative humidity, temperature, and a generic "TVOC" (Total Volatile Organic Compounds) number. On a Monday morning, the TVOC reading spikes to double the baseline. The manager is alarmed and calls in an HVAC contractor. The contractor arrives with a calibrated CO2 monitor and a separate portable particle counter, and discovers that the TVOC spike correlates exactly with a floor janitorial crew that used a new spray-on carpet cleaner in the adjacent space. The CO2 levels are perfect, the particulate counts