We have a new effort underway that will enable you to protect your family by making invisible pollution visible.

Our partner organization, The Pollution Detectives, Inc. has made available to us some new, small (about as big as a deck of cards) air quality monitors that connect to your cell phone and alert you if your home, workplace, or school is having air quality issues you should pay attention to.   These include asthma triggers, dust allergens, and things that affect brain alertness or make you sleepy.

We are expanding our “market focus” beyond school environments because our newsletter performance indicators tells us that by focusing solely on classrooms we have neglected to point out that the issues we raise about indoor air pollution in schools also occur in your home and workplace.

IAQ Monitor

So this newsletter is aimed at you, and where you live, and work.

To get started checking out your home, simply complete a Request to Borrow Tools by selecting "Indoor Air Monitor." When the monitor arrives, insert the batteries, and place it about waist high away from any air conditioning vents, printers, or cooking tools. Next, you will have to download the phone or computer app and follow the instructions that arrived in the meter box so you can see the results on your cell phone.

In about 15 minutes you can look at your phone and see live data about the pollution your family is breathing.  You will have “made the invisible pollution visible”.  If you see something confusing or concerning, reach out to us.

As you probably know, since 2023, our newsletters have featured information about indoor environmental issues in schools which lower student learning, unfairly make teachers look bad, and lower property values in the school district.

Our statistics indicate we are getting your attention.  In 2024/25, around 17,000 people like you who are involved in North Carolina schools, received our newsletters every two weeks during the school year. And because of your curiosity and desire to improve the success of your school system, the percentage of recipients who actually ‘opened the envelope’ and read the newsletter is has been around 60%, compared with national average open rates of 15%.   This is astounding.

School administrators can help students most at risk caused by poor air quality by tallying up the number of students who are most frequently absent by classroom– and reach out to us for meters to survey those classrooms with the highest illness-related absenteeism. (You do not need to share student identity with anyone). Your school nurse can also inform parents of the availability of meters (at no cost) to determine if improving the indoor air quality at home will help the child.

Once indoor environmental issues are identified at home or school, there are a wide range of solutions (from inexpensive to expensive) we can introduce you to which will allow you to seize the opportunity.  And the benefits go beyond improving student’s health – they also have a positive impact on our children’s ability to learn.

Many of our newsletter recipients are local elected officials, school board members, and community leaders.   Once they learn that a school with higher learning scores on statewide tests correlates with a higher demand for homes within the school district, resulting in a wealthier community, we have seen increased support for school leadership’s efforts to fix the issues.

Our new emphasis on your homes has a second benefit.  Asthma is the leading cause of student absenteeism in America.  About 30% of all missed school days (14 million missed school days annually!) are due to Asthma. Students who spend who spend the majority of their time in both a home and a school with poor indoor air quality experience a 15% increase in asthma-related hospital visits.

We hope that expanding our lending of indoor pollution detection equipment to parents will make everyone’s lives better. We are not stopping our surveying of indoor air quality in schools.  We are simply making it simpler to learn how to do it by lending you equipment you can use to examine the air quality in your home.

And to be clear – we have no financial linkage to any dealer or vendor – we are not making money by these efforts.  We are a mission driven organization trying to make everyone's live better.

Borrow Indoor Air Monitors For Your Home, School or Office

Highlights from...

Our Lending Library

 

Indoor Air Quality Monitors

 

Poor indoor air quality can have a surprisingly wide range of health effects, such as asthma and allergies, infectious disease, headaches, fatigue and dizziness. One little-known but especially undesirable health effect comes from a room that feels too “stuffy.”  In these conditions, your mental abilities are lessened and learning is slowed.

EPA has found that about half of all American Schools have indoor air quality that lower leaning by at least one letter grade every year. You can protect the most vulnerable among us from invisible pollution by simply reaching out to us.

IAQ Monitor

Many of our monitors provide easy-to-read results that can be viewed in real time on your cell phone by downloading a free app. The display indicates whether a component of air, such as CO2, particulate matter, or volatile organic compounds, falls within a healthy range. And when it does not, the app can notify you about the need to adjust environmental conditions in which the monitor is located.

 

Breathing clean air indoors isn’t just a comfort—

it’s essential to overall well-being.

Learn more

Borrow Indoor Air Monitors For Your Home, School or Office