Costs

The final product is your final data not how well you managed the project!

Please contact me for a quote.

Our like for like data management costs are typically 1,000 pounds lower than AEA and King's College.

Our real-time and historic website http://www.ukairquality.net is also included since this is our best tool for continually monitoring performance of your site 24/7.

There may be cheaper "data ratifiers" but poor quality and obvious mistakes are included in the package.

You need to compare this small cost with the significant cost of running your monitoring sites shown below. My expert data ratification is less than a single engineer call-out and that is before any parts.

I can process your data better, faster and cheaper.

Data Ratification Costs

My ball park costs for data management range from a few hundred to a few thousand pounds.

This depends on the number sites, pollutants and years.

Data ratification processes your unscaled measurements into reliable ratified concentrations. This either occurs throughout a year or at the end. Statistical summary reports are produced that lists all the relevant air quality statistics and exceedence counts required for Local Air Quality Management (LAMA) reports.

Data Management Costs

My ball park costs for data management range from a few hundred to a few thousand pounds.

This depends on the number sites, pollutants and years. I can provide the following services.

Other Data Service Costs

I regularly provide these services.

• Review your final dataset.
• Train you to spot unusual faults.
• Creating a "Quality Circle" that pools your knowledge and drives forward improvements
• Showing you how to create a "Ratification Production Line" to meet deadlines.

Typical Costs for the Entire Monitoring Site

AEA produced the following report outlining the typical costs of air quality monitoring a few years ago. These are now wildly out-of-date but are a useful summary of the items to consider. A Guide for Local Authorities Purchasing Air Quality Monitoring Equipment

The cost of an automated air quality monitoring programme will depend on many different factors, including location, range of pollutants monitored and of course the duration of the programme.

We only supply data management and the expert data ratification. Customers often lump these components into a single package with the site servicing and audits. Always ask for separate prices for each item when issuing tenders. This allows you to cherry-pick the best prices across all the responses. Otherwise, the instrument servicing price of our bid partners will swamp our much smaller data management component. You may then end up with a single organisation servicing your sites and managing the data. Although this may be the cheapest option, the data managers are unlikely to criticise or chase their own engineers leading to inevitable poor data quality.

I used to service the instruments at WSL in the early 1980s. You can learn by watching the engineers and reading the manuals. Everything was fine until the instrument had a fault that needed to be fixed. There was no Internet to help so you either tried a fix or paid the engineers. The few thousand spent on regular servicing and repairs by the engineers is clearly a necessary expense. Similarly a few hundred pounds spent on data ratification by an expert is worthwhile.

Data ratification and data management cannot be ignored. A few hundred or thousand pounds spent can make an enormous difference to how customers, the government and the public view your expensive data.

Contact me Geoff.Broughton@aqdm.co.uk