Air Quality Monitors Compared: AirGradient One vs. Airthings

I bought IQAir AirVisual Pro (indoor), because California’s AQMD[0] tested it as fairly accurate (and, let’s be honest, because I have been relying on their app).

It cost more than $400, and it lasted less than half a year.

The unit is made of flimsy off-white plastic, has an insanely bright blue-white display that cannot be dimmed enough (not fit for the bedroom, at all), slow menu with useless options, and (in 2024!) that weird micro USB connector. That connector is what broke after four months.

Turns out, precision is not everything.

[0] Apparently, California government has a lab that tests various consumer air quality monitors and publishes results (http://www.aqmd.gov/aq-spec/evaluations/criteria-pollutants).

Despite having dozens of evaluations, they do not seem to have tested AirGradient or Airthings or their respective sensors. I wonder if they take requests?

> It cost more than $400, and it lasted less than half a year.

I have four of IQAir's indoor ones and one of their outdoor ones. I got the first one probably 8 or 9 years ago but the others maybe 3 or 4 years ago. The original one was made before iqair bought airvisual. They all are working fine currently.

Also, for the indoor ones, you can set DND mode (I forget the exact name they use) and it'll turn off the display during the night. Does have one downside I'll cover in a sec though.

That said, until this year I always just used their website to view the data or the app. It worked.. ok. But their graphs were tiny and not very easy to use. So this year I started digging in deeper and set tried to connect things to grafana. The indoor units have a samba share where you can pull down data, but the issue is they only update that data every 5-15 minutes (15 when its in DND mode).

The outdoor unit does NOT have a samba share. You need to use their API for that. Now this is where I'm really unhappy and eventually looking at AirGradient or some other option. In order to get api access to my data on the outdoor unit I either need to pay (a lot, I forget how much) for api access, or I can get free api access if I allow iqair to sell my data to everyone else.

.. not interested in that

So I'm currently only getting data from my indoor units and only getting every ~5-15 min data points.. but they are working. I did invest a lot in these devices so not ready to upgrade to anything different just yet, but every time I see one of these air quality topics pop up here on HN it really makes me want to change.

The reason we did not do the AQ-Spec yet is that we are still doing a lot of research into fine tuning the accuracy of the monitor. For this we run a co-location project with more than 25 sites around the world. Here we compare the AirGradient to reference grade instruments to see exactly how they perform and which algorithms can tune them better. You can read more about this on our research page [1].

[1] https://www.airgradient.com/research/

I have the Airthings Wave+ and one thing that bugs me is the relative humidity threshold. Anything above 60% will give a yellow led warning. If you have many indoor plants, live in a forest, or even just ventilate a lot on rainy days the sensor will show an air quality warning. I would like to take humidity out of the equation as I much rather focus on CO2, VOC and Radon. Otherwise a great sensor that was easy to integrate in my own scripts as you can easily get all sensor readings over bluetooth.

I agree, I'd like to go with air gradient but i need a radon sensor