When the Northgate district installed 400 low-cost air-quality sensors, the budget covered the hardware, the mounting and a launch event. It did not cover what came next: calibration, replacement batteries and anyone to read the results.
Eighteen months on, about a third of the sensors have stopped reporting. The data that does arrive is useful but hard to compare with the city’s reference stations, because nobody has had time to calibrate it.
The district’s lesson is widely applicable. A pilot is easy to fund and easy to photograph. A service, which needs people and a budget that repeats every year, is neither.
The district has now ring-fenced a small annual sum for maintenance and recruited two volunteers from the local university to review the data each month. Planners say the sensors, once an expensive experiment, are beginning to earn their place as part of the district’s ordinary toolkit.
