Radio diaries: Utahns monitoring their indoor air quality wonder — are their habits worth it?

Driving to her job in Draper from her home in Magna, Cheyli Sylvester said she can see one of the reasons why she carries an inhaler most of the time. The Oquirrh Mountains fade into a smoggy blur in her rearview mirror, while the sky turns a clearer blue with every mile away from her west-side home. 

Being from the Salt Lake Valley, it’s disorienting when the mountain skyline gets lost in a haze of air pollution. It’s on those bad air days that she is unable to take full deep breaths, Sylvester discovered after a couple of years of trial and error at doctors’ offices. 

Across the valley, on a quiet street in Wasatch Hollow on Salt Lake City’s east side, Alysson and Anthony Galarza have another angle of that same view. Having grown up in Montana, Anthony became fascinated with air quality when he set foot in the Beehive State. Like Sylvester, not being able to recognize the mountains in the middle of thick coats of gray made him feel uneasy.

The people in these two households on opposite sides of the valley don’t know each other, but during the months of May and June they had the same, very specific, routine of carefully watching how every daily action altered the numbers on a small indoor air-quality sensor built by Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation. With a small fan to pull in air samples, and scattered light, the device estimated the mass concentration of PM2.5 and monitored carbon dioxide, temperature and humidity. Other two Salt Lake Valley homes also joined the project.

Most days, both households took a few minutes to reflect on their day, often while watching a dashboard with the spikes and dips of air pollution inside their homes. They also used their phones to keep a radio diary. 

The experiment led both households to revise their habits. While one decided to not change much, the other is thinking about parting ways with one of its most precious possessions.

Here’s what the recordings said.

Sylvester: The data on smoking inside

As a data scientist, Sylvester said it became a casual mission to determine whether the west-side three-bedroom house where she lives with her girlfriend in any way reflects the outside environment she shares with some of the biggest polluters in the Salt Lake Valley. 

“I love doing science. Usually I’m the one that crunches the numbers at the end. So it’s very interesting to be the one that’s making the numbers,” she said after sending her last entry. 

She approached the project with curiosity about whether the air quality inside her home was contributing to her asthma. However, with every day that went by, she grew more comfortable.

“Originally, I was really nervous that the air quality inside was going to be really bad and that I was going to have to take large measures to improve my everyday breathing,” Sylvester said. “The good news is that it didn’t scare me that much.”

After work, Sylvester unwinds by cooking dinner and smoking. As the oil heats in her pans, it releases a sometimes faint fume, while the very visible lines of smoke from her puffs travel across her kitchen.

That’s when most of her spikes of PM2.5, a mixture of tiny particles in the air, happened. 

One day she saw PM2.5 levels rise to around 60 micrograms per cubic meters (µg/m3), an unhealthy level, only from smoking, she said. Other times, with the windows open, those levels reached a low 40 µg/m3.

Aside from smoking, some of the worst PM2.5 spikes came from using dry shampoo and other aerosols, reaching about 20 µg/m3, even when she used them in a different room.

Ventilation was key, Sylvester found during the first week of the study. The cooking and smoking-related spikes diminished and the particles dissipated faster with a fan blowing and windows open. Opening the windows during spring days in Magna had another effect on Sylvester, too.

“The vibe is good, like birds chirping, the breeze coming in — even something silly, like the road traffic noise,” she said. “It’s kind of nice having the outside inside. … I don’t know how much that attributes to the air quality, necessarily, but it definitely makes me feel better.” 

The exercise of opening the windows, smelling freshly cut lawns and listening to the birds chirping was good for her mind, she said. However, the downside of having a constant reminder of how much her habits contributed to her home’s air quality was also anxiety-inducing.

“I’ve definitely noticed that I’m getting frustrated really frequently now that I’m aware of what’s going on in my home,” she said on May 23. “And I’m glad that I’m aware of it, but it’s also one of those things where now I just kind of have this anxiety about the air quality in my house.”

While Sylvester realizes smoking isn’t good for her lungs, she said it helps her sleep and doesn’t foresee stopping anytime soon. But, now she knows what can make those particles dissipate faster.

The Galarzas: Traces of art (and breakfast) 

In the cottage the Galarzas share with their daughter and their very vocal dog Bella, the couple express themselves in different ways. Alysson, an art teacher at Granger High School, creates her original artwork in different rooms and Anthony tests his creativity with new recipes in the kitchen.

The outdoor visual reminder of the polluted valley air had already prompted Anthony to buy air purifiers and frequently change the air filters inside the house. He even cleaned the HVAC system. But, there was one polluting item in the home he was willing to keep, and even pay extra for — a gas line that ensured many of their meals were cooked on top of a real flame.

“That’s gourmet,” Alysson said with a chuckle. 

The sage green sensor — which the Galarzas named Kermit, after the Muppets character — picked up the PM2.5 that circulated around their home. 

Overall, their indoor air quality was consistently in the “good” range, around 12 µg/m3 and below. It would sometimes spill over into the “moderate” range of 12-35 µg/m3 and rarely hit “unhealthy” levels of 55-150 µg/m3. 

But while monitoring the sensor, there was a pattern they couldn’t ignore.

Every time they lit a burner on their stove, even to cook something simple like a quesadilla, PM2.5 would surpass the average levels they experienced. 

What they were cooking had the power to drastically impact their indoor air quality.

On May 4, a Saturday, Anthony spent a “prolonged time” cooking in a pan on the stovetop. During that time, their PM2.5 hit 113 µg/m3, which was also the highest level of pollution recorded for the entire month. 

“We made bacon. That appeared to be the most dramatic event of the day,” Alysson said in her May 4 audio diary entry. “It does kind of seem like there are spikes in the PM2.5 when we cook longer, bigger sort of more weekend style meals at home.” 

When PM2.5 spiked that high, the Galarzas said it took around 90 minutes for levels to drop back down to the “good” range. 

However, the family also made tacos for dinner that day and observed that it “has much less of a spike” compared to what they ate for breakfast. 

Breakfast foods seemed to create the most pollution, according to the audio diaries. To celebrate Anthony’s birthday on May 29, he requested breakfast for dinner. Alysson turned on the stove to cook “all the things,” including bacon, hashbrowns and eggs.

Lo and behold, “yup, it spiked,” she said of the PM2.5 level. 

While Anthony’s talents shine in the kitchen, Alysson’s lies with her art. 

During the project, Alysson started several artworks in her chosen mediums of charcoal and chalk pastels. She knows those methods leave behind a “visible particulate,” so she “cleans really well” to keep them from polluting the house.

Even though she does the majority of her art indoors, she steps outside to use the aerosols that cure her pieces. Prior to the indoor air quality project, she would spray the fixative and then bring her artwork back inside after about 10 minutes. 

Then, on June 26, she noticed a spike in PM2.5. Instead of hovering around 12 µg/m3 like usual, it jacked up to 27 µg/m3.

“I clearly am not leaving it outside long enough in between layers for it to not be polluting my air quality indoors,” she recorded on June 27. “So yeah, that’s going to drastically change my work habits. I’m going to have to spray a layer and then go do laundry or dishes or spray a layer and work outside.” 

And Alysson’s art habits aren’t the only habits that changed. 

As summer sits in the rearview and snow begins to sprinkle down in the mountains, the Galarzas have established new cooking habits on the gas range thanks to their participation in the project. 

“We definitely did start using the hood preemptively. If I knew I was going to use the gas range, I would turn the hood vent on before I turned the range on, and then open the windows up before I started cooking,” she said, “because once we really noticed the pattern, it was undeniable.” 

But Anthony is thinking about doing the unimaginable: ditching the gas range altogether. 

“I’m going to look for a government rebate for an induction oven,” he said. 

Now, the Galarzas are just waiting for a decent discount to come around. 

Editor’s note: This story is part of Reaching for Air — a collaboration of The Salt Lake Tribune, KUER, Utah News Dispatch and the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, which explores air quality along the Salt Lake Valley’s west side.

The indoor air quality project and sensors were designed by Todd Whitney. Statistical analysis was done by Yue Zhao.