What was CONA Rangiora 2016 all about?

In winter 2016 the CONA project went back to Rangiora in Canterbury for a second year. In 2015 we'd trialled two new air quality sensing technologies - the PACMAN for indoors and the ODIN for outdoors, as well as doing detailed measurements of meteorological parameters like wind speed, direction, temperature and humidity around the town. We learned that we could use PACMAN to distinguish smoke being generated in the home from smoke seeping into the home from outside. We also found that changes in the wind shortly after sunset seemed to moving smoke around to different parts of the town.

So why did we go back for another winter? What did we hope to learn?

The 2016 study focussed on three main themes:

1. Upgrading the ODIN sensors and scaling up the network from 6 to 18 stations.
2. Pairing some of the ODINs with PACMANs by placing outside the homes of our participants to learn more about the origin of smoke in the home.
3. A more thorough evaluation of the performance of the new sensors by comparing with more expensive, conventional instrumentation.

In 2015, 2 of our 6 ODINs failed completely. The particulates sensor we were using inside them, made by Sharp, was cheap but a difficult and temperamental piece of electronics and the ones we had were clearly coming to the end of their useful life. Our head boffin, Gustavo, had heard about a new sensor made by a Chinese company, called the Plantower PMS3003. We'd heard good things about this sensor.  Gus bought a few and tested them in our office and at his home. They seemed to work really well. After some experimentation with solar panels and rechargeable batteries Gus came up with a new design and we built 18 new ODINs as fast as we could.

One of the new upgraded ODINs on a lamppost in Rangiora

 

The new ODINs were deployed across Rangiora in waves through July and August. Firstly they were sent to the Environment Canterbury monitoring station in the centre of town to compare their response to that from ECan's sophisticated regulatory monitor.

Newly built upgraded ODINs being tested at the Environment Canterbury regulatory monitoring site in Rangiora in July 2016

 

They passed that test with flying colours. Next they were installed across the town at four types of site:

1. on 6 lampposts spread across the town,
2. at our 3 temporary weather stations at the western and eastern edges of the town,
3. outside at the homes of 8 of our study participants, and
4. at the ECan monitoring site.

New ODIN attached to a temporary NIWA automatic weather station at Rangiora Racecourse

In future posts we'll tell you how the ODINs performed and what new insights they revealed about air quality in Rangiora.