SALT LAKE CITY — Wanting to understand the air quality around his house, Sunil Ravulapalli has been using a TELLUS AirU air quality monitor for about a year.
AIR QUALITY MAP: Take a real-time look at current air quality conditions in Utah
"Usually, if I have to spend some time around the house. Outside the house, this really gives me a good indication that I should not be doing that today outside," he said.
Ravulapalli has the AirU installed outside his home and shared one of his biggest concerns.
"Usually when there's an event like an inversion or something like that."
According to Ravulapalli, the monitor not only tells him what's in the air around his house, but his children have been impacted as well.
"The kids playing, spending time in the backyard in and around the house," he explained, "so I wanted to get a more better localized reading of the air quality so that's why I got TELLUS."
The companys says a key aspect of health is managing exposure, so understanding the air quality of where you live and breathe is important.
"What having sensors deployed out into the community does is it allows individual users to understand exactly what they are being exposed to so they can make some decisions," said Carl Luft, Vice President of Sales & Marketing for TELLUS. "They can replace air filters, they can open or close their windows, they can choose not to enter certain areas of the valley when they're highly polluted."
Although inversion always comes to mind for Utahns, the monitors can alert residents to critical pollution events such as wildfires or a chemical spill.
"There was a rare case where there was nothing in the news or no events but iIstill saw a high reading around the house," Ravulapalli said. "I didn't know what the cause of it was but it was interesting to see patterns around my house."
The data gathered could eventually lead to some type of regulation.
"For those that are living next to industrial operations, commercial activity, shipping yards, oil refineries, even the gravel pits, they can use the information that's generated from these sensors and these maps to reinforce the argument of these pollution sources, reinforce the argument that there are pollution sources in their neighborhood and they are creating poor air quality events for the communities around them," Luft explained.
But no explanation is needed for Ravulapalli as he's a believer in the monitors.
"I think TELLUS is perfect," he said. "Sensors like this, low-cost sensors like this, can give us so much information at the very micro level, which helps ease people's minds about what they're doing outdoors and plan their day basically."
