Hi all! Like many in California and around the world I’m interested in keeping an eye on my home’s air quality - both when I’m there and away. We get evacuated due to fires pretty regularly and the quality of the air inside is a big factor in whether we are safe to return home.
I’ve been looking at the available options for indoor AQI sensors and it seems like a pretty sparse playing field, with only a handful of options and none that give me a high comfort level in their quality. It seems that the Netatmo Element and the PurpleAir sensors are an option, but neither actively promote a SmartThings integration.
I found the community DTH for PurpleAir but it doesn’t seem to work with the new ST App, and at this point with the transition already completed that’s a dealbreaker. I also am not a huge fan of their operating model, where everything goes to their cloud first and only, and the DTH retrieves data from it.
Netatmo seems quite legitimate (Legrand is a well known company) but their devices seem difficult to find and expensive.
Also seen some home built devices using RPis, which I’d be totally OK with but the integrations seem to be somewhat abandoned and I don’t want to spend the time and money to roll my own, then be left in the lurch.
Is there no other simple air quality monitoring solution that can do at least PM2, CO2 and send that data to ST? Anyone have any tips?
I use Awair and it works great. Be aware of the official integration though. It is totally hosed. When you attempt to sign it, not only will it fail to add the device, but it will remove the room from every single other device, so you have to reconfigure your entire environment. There is a custom DTH that works great though, but it has not yet been updated for the new app.
Ah, this is good stuff to know. I read some stories about the authentication model for older devices not working properly, but the new ones have issues too it sounds like. I’m OK with doing a little bit of troubleshooting to get where I want to be, but I’m tired of all these busted partner integrations that the manufacturers don’t care to fix. I’m looking squarely at you, Rachio, SkyBell, etc. I was hoping for something native z-wave that wouldn’t have so much of a cloud model, but I’ll check more deeply into Awair. Thanks!
You can integrate Netatmo via IFTTT, that’s fairly popular.
Amazon carries them, so that part’s easy. But I believe the indoor air quality sensor is only sold as a set on Amazon with the outdoor weather sensor, so the price is high.
I personally just got an Airthings Wave Plus since it’s the only one I could find that measured Radon. No direct SmartThingss integration, but they do have IFTTT. Too early to give a verdict, though.
Ah, those looked to be the premium devices for sure, but they don’t do PM2 measurements, which is my main concern (smoke infiltration from wildfires, etc). It seems crazy to me that this function has so few players, after all everyone breathes…
Thanks! Anyone have experience to share on how many square feet these devices can be trusted to be mostly accurate over? Don’t have a super large house or anything but it is two floors, and I’m interested in monitoring both floors. I guess I should get two?
I also looked at Kaiterra but was put off by the reviews. So many people saying the measurements swing wildly around was concerning. Ultimately I went with these Awair units that were recommended and while I don’t have them to comment firsthand yet, the thing I like is that there’s an actual DTH which lets me have a home dashboard, covering the metrics I care about. Taking actions based on those metrics should be the edge case rather than the rule, so I wanted something that gave me good visibility/metrics, and not just IFTTT style interactions.
Well that’s completely maddening. My order from them only just shipped today, the tracking number isn’t even valid yet. Any idea if the custom DTH will continue to work? If these don’t integrate well with SmartThings they’re going straight back to them.
The stock DTH never worked correctly anyway. You can actually connect locally to the devices (a Homebridge plug-in does this) or via the cloud, so I’m not worried about having some custom DTH that continues to work.
As far as I know the official integration never worked. The custom dth uses the awair developer api (which can also be connected locally if they shut down their cloud api service) so I have no worries about this continuing to work in the future.
