Combating pollution

At certain times of the year, Thailand can have the worst air pollution anyone couldn’t imagine. For one moment you’re running in the park, strolling alongside the street of Bangkok, and in no time you’d be getting cancer if you stay outside long enough.

We keep seeing news about people getting sick, severe allergies, bleeding, and even cancer from just living. Oh boi, that doesn’t sound good, does it?

To be fair, there are elements that humans can and can’t control, Thailand could have had better transportation system, better regulation on contaminatingthe environment, etc. but it chose not to do anything about it.

Leaving nature aside, at least we have quite some control of our environment. You can decide to live somewhere far from the city, like I do.

Looking at the map, the area around my place almost always has better air quality than in the middle of Bangkok. But that doesn’t mean I can just go out strolling around outside under such pollution.

My mom and dad, usually like to go out walking or cycling with my nephew and I don’t want them to take a hit from bad pollution and get sick. How should I deal with it?

First, I bought an air quality and put it in my living to monitor the air quality. I got this one from IKEA.

Connecting it to my homeassistant instance is a breeze (I can talk about homeassistant another time since it's a great topic on its own), then I could view the air quality trend in my living room.

Then when I see the air quality is getting worse, I'll tell my parent in my family group chat, so they are aware and don't just go out and do activities and whatnot.

It's just that I'm not always available to tell my parent every time the air quality gets worse am I?

I need to automate this. So I wrote a simple Line (a popular messaging app in South East Asia) bot connecting to my homeassistant instance and automatically announcing the air quality when it gets better or worse.

And that's how I save myself time, and make sure my parents know when the air gets better or worse so they could make a conscious decision whether they can go outside and do activities.

In the next episode, I'll talk about how these mechanics work, and shed some light on AQI versus pollution concentration, since everybody seems to be using AQI, but I personally don't like it. I'll tell you why.