Review on 🔬 Advanced Temtop M10I Electrochemical Detector: Professional-grade Accuracy and Precision by Zack Frazier

I had high hopes for this unit and have acclimated it outdoors by turning it off for six hours as instructed. However, I found that the formaldehyde detector was falsely high. Like many formaldehyde detectors, this one is no exception and reads false positives from other VOCs. I tested this with several non-formaldehyde VOCs (IPA, ethanol, etc.) but the most impressive was tangerine. My normal formaldehyde levels in different rooms of the house were 0.22ppm and 0.81ppm for total volatile organic compounds. Those aren't huge numbers, but we just repainted our house and did the floors, so that's to be expected. What was not expected was that the tangerine itself could increase formaldehyde levels by 64% to 0.36 ppm. within a few minutes. Removing the tangerine causes the level to return to its original level. It was expected that this would increase total volatile organic compounds (since tangerines contain volatile terpenes) to 1.13ppm. Again, removing the tangerine causes this value to fall back to the baseline as well. But this just shows that the formaldehyde detector is not very selective. Trying isopropyl alcohol was a much more dramatic experience. The formaldehyde content exceeded 4 ppm even though the IPA does not contain formaldehyde. The VOCs were clearly at their limit in the presence of IPA, but this should not have affected the formaldehyde content. Therefore, the device is not suitable for measuring formaldehyde levels or air quality, which takes into account low values. This is probably normal for PM 2.5 and all VOCs. In my tangerine example, the air quality in my room went from Fair to Poor with the presence of tangerine, so I also find the overall air quality useless. Those damn tangerines.