Low Cost, Accurate Monitoring of Indoor Carbon Monoxide Concentrations

Abstract

This paper reports on the ICOM carbon monoxide monitoring device, this is a low cost, highly accurate, data logger. In the default setting it monitors carbon monoxide (CO) every minute and stores an average CO reading every 15 minutes. Air temperature is also recorded. The logger is physically small, approximately the size of 2 cigarette packets, it is rechargeable and requires no programming to start, just switching on. The technology behind the logger is similar to that used in the StreetBox monitoring instrument, which was developed from a prototype made by the author and used in various research projects [1,2]. This paper describes the monitoring device and reports briefly on a case study where 80 of the loggers were used to monitor CO in homes at risk from high CO concentrations. The ICOM logger has been shown to be accurate and the inter-instrument variation to be within 0.2ppm at low concentrations and 5% at higher concentrations.