The founder of Smart Air says having clean air shouldn’t mean spending a fortune. When he was still a psychology graduate student, he decided to look into the air purifier business. His doubts about the sky-high price of air purifiers led him to create an effective and cheap DIY air purifier for only $30 in a country where an average air purifier costs as much as $1,000. If you want to learn more about Thomas, read this short interview.
Have you had any difficulties creating and promoting DIY air purifiers? How did people react to them?
In the early days, a huge challenge was that some people really didn’t believe me. They saw companies selling air purifiers for $1,000, and they saw a psychology grad student strapping filters on fans for $30. Who were they going to believe? On the internet in China, some people attacked me as a “wenkesheng.” That means I wasn’t studying science or engineering, so I clearly had no idea what I was talking about.
Smart Air focuses on the data-driven approach. How does data play a role in the development and improvement of your products?
My commitment to data is what allowed me to overcome those challenges. I didn’t ask people to believe me. I asked them to look at the data. I knew I wasn’t an expert, but I knew enough about the scientific method to test a basic question and use data to see whether it was true or not.
So I documented everything. I told people exactly how I was testing everything. I put the data online for everyone to see. And the data spoke for itself. Air purifiers are just fans and filters. The companies touting their advanced, $1,000 technologies are marketing to you. It’s not science. Follow the data, and you’ll save your money and your health!
Technology is constantly evolving. Do you see any new tech ideas that might make air cleaning better?
This won’t be a popular answer, but not really! I think people put too much weight on technological breakthroughs with air purifiers. The easiest way to get tricked is to look for an air purifier with the latest technology. The newest technologies tend to be dangerous, untested, or just pure marketing gimmicks.
The Molekule air purifier is a great example. A few years back, they grabbed headlines with their “new technology” that they claimed didn’t just capture air pollutants but DESTROYED them. Sounded great! Tons of people bought them. Magazines wrote about how innovative they were. Then people actually tested them, and the results were terrible. Consumer Reports called the results “dismal.”
There’s no need to fall for marketing gimmicks with new technologies. We’ve had HEPA filters for 70 years, and we know they work great. They won’t grab any new headlines, but neither do antibiotics, and they continue to save lives every day.
I hope that one day, governments around the world will put us out of business.
What does Smart Air want to achieve in the future, both in making better products and in overall goals?
I hope that one day, governments around the world will put us out of business. No one needs to suffer from air pollution. We know how to stop it. It’s just a matter of will. If one day I have to stop doing Smart Air, I’ll be sad, but I’ll also be extremely happy that I get to walk outside without worrying about air pollution!
What advice would you give to people who want to help improve air quality, based on your experiences with Smart Air?
One difficult lesson I’ve had to learn is that you can’t force people to help themselves. People have to agree that something is a problem before they’ll work to solve it. So you’ll have the most impact where people already know that something is a problem. Early on with Smart Air, we wanted to get our DIY workshops into Hebei, the province next to Beijing. Hebei was even more polluted than Beijing, and income is lower, so it made perfect sense for our low-cost DIY air purifiers.
We spent a lot of time and effort trying to organize workshops in Hebei, and no one showed up. At one workshop, the only people who listened were the people who were already in the café that hosted the workshop and were too polite to leave when we started talking. We wasted a lot of time trying to reach people who had other concerns than air pollution. But when they’re ready, we’ll be back!
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