Airthings House Kit
Monitor your home’s air quality with this smart home system
The kit offers Alexa, Google Assistant and IFTTT support, but doesn’t play nicely with HomeKit
£269 FROM Airthings, airthings.com FEATURES Smart home air quality monitoring, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and IFTTT integration
Oh, what an atmosphere, Russ Abbot once sang, although he probably wasn’t thinking about Radon, mould and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) when he wrote it. Heck, ‘party’ and ‘VOC’ even rhyme. What a chorus that would have been.
Luckily, you can ensure a happy atmosphere at home with the Airthings House Kit – a one-box air monitoring solution that comprises an Airthings Wave Mini (available separately for £69), a Wave (£169), and a Hub (£69) for £269. We last looked at the Airthings Wave Mini in MF343, but this kit takes things further by offering way more functionality, including Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and If This Then That (IFTTT) support. However, while Airthings includes a free app for iOS and a web dashboard, the system doesn’t play nice with Apple’s HomeKit, which is a shame.
Setup is straightforward. We put the Wave Mini in a bedroom where we could use it to monitor mould risk, VOCs, temperature and humidity; and the Wave in the living room, where it can measure Radon, temperature and humidity. We linked the two together using the Hub, which enables you to monitor the atmosphere in your home both locally and remotely using the aforementioned iOS app and web dashboard. Both the Wave Mini and Wave are battery-powered and are easily set up using Bluetooth and the iOS app; the Hub is slightly more convoluted in that it needs mains power and a direct connection to your Wi-Fi router.
Another shortcoming at this stage is the design of the Airthings devices – while the Wave, Wave Mini and Hub are unobtrusive (in much the same way most smoke detectors are), only the Mini comes with a clip-on stand so it can be used free-standing. The Wave and Hub both ideally need to be screwed to a wall, which may be an issue if you’re renting. This is particularly true for the Hub, where the cables hang off the bottom of the device, rather than attaching to the back. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it’s worth bearing in mind.
Calibrate and go
Once the system’s up and running, it’ll start delivering room measurements within the hour, although it can take up to seven days for the Airthings to calibrate properly. You can see how your home is doing at any time by waving your hand in front of the Wave or Wave Mini – red is bad, orange is fair and green is good – with more detail available through the iOS app or web dashboard.
Additionally, the iOS app can alert you if a room is too chilly or stuffy, for example. If you’re using Alexa, Google or IFFFT, you can use this information to trigger further actions – notching up the temperature using a smart thermostat, say, but HomeKit owners are literally left in the cold. Rob Mead-Green