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by site-packages1 1363 days ago
I have a few of the Airthings View Plus units. Can’t speak objectively but when there are fires or something degrading air quality, PM2.5 rises, when all windows and doors are closed, co2 rises and then falls when I open the windows and turn on the fan blowing the air out. VOCs rise can be correlated directly with the nest turning on our old AC unit and then with it turning off and fanning the air out the windows. Radon seems to rise with outdoor temperature when it gets hot out. One per floor of the house and they are all correlated with the things above, and the VOCs in the room with the most air conditioning blowing rise the most, so I feel pretty happy about their efficacy.

I’ve been happy with these units so far after six months.

4 comments

Happy user here. I started with 2 of the BT connected widgets, that used my phone to upload to the cloud. I then added to the Airthing View Plus which does wifi, BT, and if you plug a cable in will act as a gateway from bluetooth to the airthings web service.

Seems like a cool company, and have seen things like forest fires, using a gas stove, and burning things while cooking all correlate with readings. In particular I noticed that 3am in my bedroom has a pretty big CO2 spike. I also monitored radon before, during, and after some radon mitigation.

I really like that at least some of their units allow exporting their data to graphana, without any cloud involvment. I'm unsure if the view plus does the same though.

So for the HN crowd, lots of sensors, can use a raspberry pi as a gateway, your phone, or a turn key view plus. Graphana support is a big plus and you don't have to use any cloud service if you don't want to.

I do wish they had a carbon monoxide sensor.

I have these for a year and I'm rather happy with them. The view plus acts as a hub for the minis and the values measured correlate with smells and stale air feel of the rooms. They did help me significantly improve my sleep quality.

The fact that they have a good API made them worth the fairly steep entry price.

We got at least one which seems faulty, but to their credit they immediately got back to us and asked for more data for their engineering to look at. The numbers produced are obviously very very wrong. They seem solid otherwise and are accessible with open source tools.
I notice their response wasn't "Your device appears to be faulty, here's an RMA shipping tag".

You are giving them a lot of credit when it seems that "The numbers produced are obviously very very wrong" is the headline (by a large margin).

Can the Airthing View Plus (or any Airthing) be used without connecting to Wifi or BT? I just want to see current quality of air on the device.
Not OP, but I think the View Plus is the only one with a screen. I have the Wave Plus that is BT. I simply use a Home assistant and ESPHome to integrate everything network wide.