Kitchen Air Purifier Comparison

post by jefftk (jkaufman) · 2025-01-22T03:20:03.224Z · LW · GW · 2 comments

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I make breakfast for the kids most mornings, and one thing I didn't realize before I started playing with an air quality monitor was how much this puts smoke in the air. It's not like cooking Naan or searing meat where if I don't put a fan in the window the smoke alarm will go off, but apparently it's quite a lot of particles:

chart showing
a lot of pm2.5 that decays slowly

While I initially got interested in air quality from an infection reduction perspective, I'd also prefer not to be breathing smoke. How much does an air purifier help? What about opening a window? Running the little vent fan over the stove that doesn't seem to do anything?

I decided to run some tests. In each case I'd set up my M2000 in the kitchen and start cooking breakfast for the kids. For consistency, I only did this on days when I was making the most common option: crepes. While it would have been best to try each condition a few times to learn what sort of variability there was, I wasn't that patient.

The conditions I tested were:

While I liked the idea of cooking the same breakfast each time, it didn't make a consistent amount of smoke. Some days I let the pan get a little hotter, sometimes I would forget a crepe in the pan, etc. What should be comparable, though, is the rate at which smoke particles decreased. This should be a process of exponential decay: every minute a consistent fraction of the particles should make their way out the doors into other parts of the house, settle out of the air, be caught in a filter, etc.

I wrote some code, with a significant LLM speedup, to plot the decay I saw in each case. For each example I started estimating after the peak when it seemed be entering its exponential decay phase, and then stopped counting when it fell below 50ug/m3:

Since this is exponential decay, however, a logarithmic y-axis better allows us to judge how good the model is:

Conclusions:

I did most of this work when Lily was asking for crepes all the time, but aside from what I'm guessing was a one-off this morning that's not what she wants these days. If at some point she changes her mind, I'd like to test:

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comment by Dave Orr (dave-orr) · 2025-01-22T03:57:27.612Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This is great data! I'd been wondering about this myself. 

 

Where were you measuring air quality? How far from the stove? Same place every time?

Replies from: jkaufman
comment by jefftk (jkaufman) · 2025-01-22T12:12:22.443Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Other side of the room, about ten feet from the stove. Same place each time, yes.