Autumn's Hypothesis is that the Incense will have the most PM2.5 impact because it involves burning and scent which are known to have air pollution impact, and candles might be a close second for the same reason. I think the least amount of PM2.5 impact will be Air fresheners even though their gross they might have more impact on health with the chemicals, but less with PM2.5.

Ramona's Hypothesis is that the wax burner is going to have the most PM2.5 in it because it is burning scented wax which has potential air polution from certain types of wax and fragrances. And I think Air fresheners will have the least amount of PM2.5 because you are not burning anything!It will probally be not great for your health but I think it will have least amount of PM2.5!

Why did we choose our materials? Well for incense it is known to burn and burning things can release PM2.5 and same with candles. and for Perfume and air fresheners they have dangerous and artificial particles that can possibly attached to PM2.5, with the Wax burner, it can burn/ melt the wax and same with the incense and candles.

CONTROLLED: How long we wait for potential PM2.5 to leave space, Room which experiment is in, the monitor.

MANIPULATED: Different Potential PM2.5 activities, and the responding PM2.5 level, which place in the room that we burned/sprayed.

First we will get our PM2.5 monitor ready, Next we will burn the incense for 20 minutes and check out monitor. Each time we burn/spray etc we will wait a full day to make sure the potential PM2.5 does not affect our variables. Each time we burn we will check the PM2.5 level at before, 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, and 20 minutes. The next day we will set up the monitor and burn our scented candle for 1 minutes, them record the values in our notebook then blow them out and then record for the next 20 minutes. for perfume we sprayed 2 times in the sink and closed that door and recorded at same times and viewed our results

There was a lot of smoke and very strong fragrant from the candles!

• ALL scenarios increased the amount of pollutants in the air, some of them dramatically!
• The candles created a lot of smoke and fragrance in the room.  The range of PM2.5 was 2 to 272!!
• The incense created a small stream of smoke the entire 20 mins.  The PM2.5 jumped to 145 after 3 mins and stayed around 100 for the rest of the time.  
• The perfume was very strong smelling and the TVOC, CO, HCHO were CRAZY high!  But there was 0 PM2.5 measured. 
• The electric soy wax burner seemed to have the lowest effect on the pollutants in the air.  The PM2.5 was 0 the entire time, and there was only a small increase in other contaminants. However, TVOCs still increased about 300%!
• The monitor said there was a ‘dangerous gas concentration’ for both perfume and incense!  Both of these showed very high levels of Carbon Monoxide (CO) which is lethal and so we are very concerned about this!

• If you want to reduce pollutants in your home, it’s best to avoid all of the products we tested, especially incense and perfume. 
• If you prefer to use any of these, the best choice with the lowest impact on indoor air quality is the electric wax melter.
• If you want to use candles, it’s best to reduce the smoke that is created by the wick when the candle is blow out.  Maybe a drop of water would work well to reduce the wick smoking.
• Fresh Outside air in winter appears to be lower in all pollutants measured than the air inside a house.  Open the windows when you can, and spend lots of time outside playing!

For Candles the range was from 2 - 272 PM2.5 for perfume there was no PM2.5 but we will tell you how the TVOC skyrocketed and same with the HCHO.  the range was 7 - 8, 163 for TVOC for wax burners The range was always 1 for the incense The Range was from 1 - 145 PM2.5

We think all people should know the possible PM2.5 that they are releasing in their house can just be candles or their favorite perfume, We also want to bring awareness to very dangerous particle people could breathing in, Causing Asthma cancer etc.

At first we were just going to light the candles and keep them  burning for 20 minutes, but we did a test run and the PM2.5 stayed at 0 until the candles were blown out, then there was a major increase in PM2.5.  So we made the decision to measure the effects of blowing out a candle after burning for one minute.  We had to restart one test because the exhaust fan was left on, and another test because the furnace was blowing fresh air into the room. Another sources of error is we left the fan on and the window and the PM2.5 battery died for incense.

Fine particulate matter - Canada.ca What Is a Particulate Matter (PM) Sensor and How Does It Work? - Rika Sensor Long-term PM2.5 exposure increases asthma risk Air Fresheners' Hidden Environmental Impact: Uncovering Harmful Effects | ShunWaste Local Air Quality Health Index

A special thanks to, Mrs. Schmitz for organizing all of this! And another big thanks to Mrs. Polly for always helping, thanks to Mrs. Tanis to for making time to help. And lastly our parents for helping all of our probably very annoying requests for all of this to happen! And Kevin, Autumns dad for teaching us about graphing!