Monitoring air quality

There was a discussion in January about how to tell if your air
filter needs new filtration beads.  I noticed that potassium
permanganate was suggested as an indicator substance that could be
added to carbon filters, as it changes colour when it absorbs
pollutants.

Is this a possible answer to the inexpensive monitoring of air
pollutants in a repository?  Are there better ones?  (The ideal, of
course would be to have an automatic running record of the levels of
specific, known pollutants such as sulphur dioxide, and also the
levels of strong oxidizing and reducing agents in general, and the
pH, with a sensing apparatus that could be moved to any location in
the repository. I suspect that this would not be cost effective for
most small archival repositories.)

Alaric Posey
MAS student, UBC

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                  Conservation DistList Instance 11:74
                   Distributed: Friday, March 6, 1998
                       Message Id: cdl-11-74-019
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