Ceramic gas sensors used for measuring ambient air quality have features suitable for practical applications such as healthcare and air quality management, but have a major drawback-large power consumption to preheat the sensor for accurate measurements. In this paper; the adaptive preheating duration control (APC) method is proposed to reduce the power consumption of ambient air quality sensor networks. APC reduces the duration of unnecessary preheating, thereby alleviating power consumption. Furthermore, the APC can allow systems to meet user requirements such as accuracy and periodicity factor when detecting the concentration of a target gas. A performance evaluation of the power consumption of gas sensors is conducted with various user requirements and factors that affect the preheating duration of the gas sensor. This shows that the power consumption of the APC is lower than that of continuous power supply methods and constant power supply/cutoff methods.