Keep tabs on your home's air quality with Amazon's latest device
Amazon has announced the Smart Air Quality Monitor, a little box that analyzes the air quality in your home.
The monitor checks for dust, volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide in the air, which enters the device through a grille on its front.
And, as you might guess, it relays this information through Echo Show smart displays and notifications delivered through the Alexa app.
It’s not just about air quality, though.
The Amazon Smart Air Quality Monitor will also show the temperature and humidity — a handy way to tell if you’re under the weather or if it really is cold in your living room.
Read this: The best air quality monitors for your home
Air quality sensors are fairly common nowadays. You can get low-cost humidity sensors online. Dyson puts air quality indicators into its fans, alongside HEPA filters. Many dehumidifiers also have HEPA systems that use a fine mesh to weed out impurities in the air.
The Amazon Smart Air Quality Monitor does not actually affect the air quality in your home like some of these, but it does give you more fine-grain information on what’s actually going on around your head.
Stacks of stats
It records separate stats for temperature, humidity, air pollution, carbon monoxide and VOCs.
Some of these might be slightly hard to parse if you’re new to the terminology. Air pollution is measured as PM ug/m3, which tells you the number of micrograms of unwanted stuff per cubic metre in the air. CO, carbon monoxide, is relayed as a “ppm”, parts per million, figure.
VOCs are volatile organic compounds, which are gases emitted from liquids or solids. You may be familiar with these if you buy white spirit for DIY jobs.
If too much of this evaporates into your kitchen because you left the lid off, the Smart Air Quality Monitor will let you know.
VOCs are measured as an “index”, reporting changes over time.
The Amazon Smart Air Quality Monitor records all these stats and lets you view a history of the results. This could be handy in colder climates, where you might leave the windows closed a bit too often.
If you’re less interested in the nerdy stuff you can just look at the LED on the front. Green means good, orange not so good — as far as we can tell from documentation released so far.
It makes you wonder: does this mean Amazon is going to start making smart fans or air purifiers? There is actually already a purifier in Amazon’s Basics range, which uses a classic HEPA-style filter to remove impurities.
However, the ideal end point here is something like a dehumidifier that will tell you when the air reaches a certain level of humidity, and fires you a notification to let you turn it on remotely.
That said, in research we’ve undertaken when writing about air quality systems in the past, the advice from the pros is often to open your windows rather than buy a HEPA system.
Of course, that might ring hollow if you live right next to a main road and get a waft of exhaust whenever you do so.
Amazon’s Smart Air Quality Monitor is available to pre-order now for $69.99. It will start shipping in December.
