Not so sure these reflect actual air qual. There are places that read 0 or very low that i know are big pollution areas (like near industry or even when I can see wildfire smoke)
1 Like
There are some that seem broken and someone needs to reach out to them.
I also feel broken ones shouldn’t read zero as that could be seen as good air quality.
1 Like
One thing I suspect is that there are indoor sensors mistakenly labeled as outdoor sensors - I think that’s the default. I wonder if PurpleAir could detect at least cases where this happens by looking at the temperature being reported, and see whether it’s at least roughly tracking the outdoor temperatures at the time?
1 Like
Indoor Sensor
@lucienve makes a great point that you could be seeing an indoor sensor. If it has a black ring around the icon, it’s an indoor sensor.
Low-Confidence Sensor
Otherwise, it’s possible that it’s a low-confidence sensor with a laser counter that has a dead fan. If it’s slightly transparent compared to nearby sensors, you can be almost certain that this is the case. We have an algorithm that attempts to track these down, but it doesn’t catch all of them. If you can share details about the sensor (Sensor Index or Name), we might be able to do something about it.