The Pure Air Project

By the end of 2025, we had built over 50 purifiers this way, one by one, and given them to the families who needed them most

The room smells like food, incense. It’s humid. A grandmother is bent over a length of cable trunking with a screwdriver, building something she's never seen before.

Next to her, a child, maybe eight, is assembling a filter housing with more precision than I managed on my first attempt.

A homeless man who wandered in to volunteer is smiling, working alongside everyone else. None of them knew what they'd signed up for when they walked in.

Then the first unit switches on. Air rushes through the filters and out the fan propellers, forming a plume of clean air. The room shifts: beaming smiles. This is the Pure Air Project.

By the end of 2025, we had built over 50 purifiers this way, one by one, and given them to the families who needed them most – the bedridden, the elderly, families with young children whose lungs are most vulnerable.

Each unit costs about 1,000 baht. Roughly $30. The commercial equivalent costs over $500. But I should explain how I got here.

I've loved building things since I was three. I started with plastic train tracks, then build box kits, then IKEA furniture, then elaborate Rube Goldberg machines. During COVID, it turned into designing origami carbon fibre laptop stands, wooden playground structures for my younger sisters.

For years, that instinct had no particular direction. Then I started teaching violin at the Immanuel music school in Khlong Toei, Bangkok's largest slum.

The community lives beside a six-lane road and on top of a sewage reservoir – literally.

Air pollution is a given in Thailand, but as a student buried in curated slivers of three or four A-Level subjects, I hadn't grasped how bad the problem actually was.

Then one day, during a lesson, I saw a small child with a nosebleed. The thing was - The teachers weren't alarmed. That's normal here.

After that, I couldn't stop noticing it – children coughing, wheezing, in the music rooms and on the streets. In Thailand alone, over 30,000 people die each year from pollution-related diseases.

I couldn't unsee it. I felt like I had to build something.

Exploration.

My early prototypes were rough. I was teaching myself an industry I had no formal training in. I read Think Like an Engineer, which introduced me to constraints and trade-offs, and I identified mine:

The purifier had to be under 1,000 baht, quiet enough for living spaces and music rooms, durable, effective at filtering PM2.5, and simple enough that anyone could assemble one with minimal training. 

Over several months, I built about a dozen prototypes. Triangular filter arrangements, square ones, circular ones.

PC fans, server fans, ventilator fans, duct fans. Various housing materials. Most failed in one way or another – too loud, too expensive, or too fragile.

Then in June 2025, I finally I designed and built a purifier that I was happy with. I'd set up a makeshift test chamber and used candles as a PM2.5 source to measure filtration.

I used my Further Maths A-level knowledge to calculate the PM2.5 decay constant and performance. When I saw the numbers, something clicked. It can work. And it can work cheaply.

After that, I stopped tinkering alone. I talked to air purification experts, began peering into every air purifier I could find – at school, at home – examining whatever I could apart.

I spent hours logging every characteristic and design feature of commercial units, connecting things in my head and learning as I went.

Each unit I opened answered a question I didn't know I had - That itself prompted even more questions. I partnered with the Bangkok Community Help Foundation to produce and distribute purifiers at scale.

Friso, the cofounder, was supportive from the start, running a massive foundation with over 2,000 volunteers and a media company on top of it.

Together, we ran the workshops in Khlong Toei that became the heart of the project. The point was never to build something for the community and leave.

It was to build local capacity, to train people to construct and maintain the purifiers themselves, so the project survives after I'm gone.

My desk.

Right now, my desk is a kind of organized chaos. Eleven different potential fans. Filters of all sizes. PVC pipes with 3D-printed grilles attached.

Tools scattered between a Statistics 3 textbook, a sketching notebook full of different designs, and my two beloved 2H pencils and ruler.

A half-dismantled Xiaomi purifier sits to one side – I'm trying to understand centrifugal fans better and I haven't managed to keep it in one piece.

I've spent ten hours over the last three days studying fans alone, both from a factory-practical perspective and a theoretical one.

When I look at a prototype, I can feel the air entering the filters and exiting the fan. I see the airflow moving through the housing, vividly, intuitively, the way you might hear a chord before you play it.

And what I'm always thinking isn't an intellectual question.

It's more like an instinct: how can it be better?

The future.

The plan has two tracks. I'll keep developing the 1,000-baht model for Khlong Toei – affordable, buildable, effective. And I'm designing a school-grade purifier for Bangkok Prep that matches the filtration performance of the 15,000-baht commercial units we currently use, for 1,500 baht.

The constraints are brutal: quiet, highly effective, easy to source and assemble with minimal custom components, and ten times cheaper than anything on the market. Every limitation has forced a discovery.

This summer, I'll be working with senior researchers in the U.S. on airflow and purifier design. And I’m planning to partner with schools across Thailand to produce purifiers in the hundreds – for classrooms and for the communities nearby that need them.

I'm starting an engineering club at Bangkok Prep this year to run air quality research with students. We have the numbers to work at scale, and it will teach more about real engineering than any A-Level practical ever could.

Let's build purifiers together.  

Thanks to my mum, who urged me to document everything – drawings, photos, scribbles in pocket notebooks, voice recordings. Without that habit, I wouldn't have advanced this far.

Thanks to Mr. Burke, who gave me Mastery by Robert Greene. That book reshaped how I think about apprenticeship and learning.

And to Mr. Bunberry – the most positive, creative, and humble teacher I've met – who I hope to work with on the engineering club. And to Friso, for being unfailingly supportive and enthusiastic through all of this.

I look up to him. I'm standing on the shoulders of these people. I'm grateful.