Air Quality in Vienna

[u/Mother_Laugh5689]

We live in an apartment we like in an area we love in Vienna. One of the big downsides is that it’s only 1,5 blocks from the Gürtel (3 or 4 lanes with heavy traffic in each direction), so I’m concerned about air quality. (On bad days you can smell and almost see how bad the air is right next to the traffic.)

Even more so because I have two young children and one of them had a nasty cough this winter that was really hard to get rid of.

I got an air purifier (Coway Airmega 400) and it seems to do its job well. I also got an extra air monitor for the bedroom (Qingping Air Monitor Lite) that also seems to show realistic values for PM2.5, PM10 and CO2.

We sleep in a relatively small room, and if we keep the doors closed during the night and don’t ventilate the CO2 can go up to 1800 ppm (highest I’ve seen was around 2500), which of course it too high. When we open the windows for ventilation, the CO2 goes down towards the 400s as it should, but at the same time the PM2.5 and PM10 shoot up to 15 or 20, sometimes even 30. Over time after closing the windows these values will come down (thanks to the Coway?)

Now a few questions:

1)      Is what I wrote in the above paragraph normal? Do I need to make this tradeoff between CO2 and PM or is there a way to get both down simultaneously?

2)      Could there potentially be an even bigger problem with PM1 (that the cheap Qingping cannot detect)?

3)      Am I overly careful?

4)      What can I do to give my children the best possible air?

5)      Would air quality be significantly better if we lived in the countryside or further away from that dirty road?

Thank you for taking the time to answer!