A few weeks ago I was caught up in the amazing world of the International Consumer Electronics Fair (CES), held in Las Vegas, in which conversations revolved around the next generation of pollution meters that Who knows, maybe we will have someday on our phone.
The demonstrations that I could see invited to make cabals about what would be the next great invention in home technology. Would they be smart cat beds?Teapots with Internet connection? Whatever it is, the gadget in question will come equipped with machine learning and will work with the indecipherable block chain.
However, if there is one issue that consumers are particularly concerned about, it is the quality and purity of the smallest air purifier, and the major appliance manufacturers, aware of this, have launched a series of related products on the market.
They have been joined by numerous startups , offering alternatives such as robots that roam the house cleaning everything they find or curious devices inspired by nature that blowsmallest air purifier air into the leaves of indoor plants that do not look good.
In Europe these tools are not yet convincing, so the assessment that can be made of them on our continent may not be entirely correct if we look at Asia and other places in the world, where the devices that filter the air in the home every are more widely used.
In some respects, indoor air purification can go a long way. In a completely closed space, purifiers that filter the air reduce the concentration of tiny particles that are harmful to the body, especially in places with a high level of pollution, such as the center of cities such as Beijing or New Delhi.
The removal of harmful gases indoors, including volatile organic compounds derived from paints and glues, is quite a different matter.
Some systems use a carbon filter to which gases are attached, but the data pointing to the reliability of this procedure is still very small.
Other types of purifiers use ultraviolet radiation to speed up a chemical reaction that converts these gases to carbon dioxide and water. However, manufacturers have yet to comment on the possibility that this process will in practice turn relatively benign compounds into something much more damaging.
Tests carried out to filter the air outside have not, at the moment, been very effective, since the atmosphere is too large compared to the size of the filtration system.
However, the balance indoors is satisfactory. Homes have air volumes that range from hundreds to, in some cases, thousands of cubic meters; with air currents and leaks alone, the environment inside a home can be completely recycled approximately every hour. Therefore, there are still many cubic meters of air to clean, and the end does not seem to be visible.