The Amazon Smart Air Quality Monitor is a compact and inexpensive Alexa-enabled device that helps you keep track of the quality of the air in your home. It’s capable of sensing and alerting you of potentially harmful levels of particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, and carbon monoxide in the air. It also monitors humidity and temperature.
With native integration with the Amazon Alexa App, you get detailed reporting on air quality throughout each day and can set up useful routines, like triggering an air purifier when the air quality in your home is poor.
It’s important to note that many modern Smart Air Purifiers have air quality monitors built-in, however, with its compact design, and low price, you can easily place multiple Amazon Smart Home Air Monitors throughout your home, which allows for a more prescriptive approach to air purification.
Related: Best smart air purifiers for your home (2022)
Amazon Smart Air Quality Monitor
3.5/5
✔ Pros
- Small, compact design
- Inexpensive
- Easy to set up
- Integrates well with Amazon Alexa
✖ Cons
- The use case is too narrow
- Much of the information is non-actionable without the use of an air purifier
Design
The Amazon Smart Air Quality Monitor is compact, measuring just 2.56″ x 1.77″. Its small size provides more flexibility in terms of where to place it in your home. Amazon recommends placing a Smart Air Quality Monitor in every room of your home you wish to monitor.
The Smart Air Quality Monitor is also equipped with an LED indicator, which stays green when the air quality in your home is good and turns red when the quality is poor. You can also choose to keep the green LED indicator off, which is helpful if you find the LED Indicator distracting.
Setup
Setting up the Smart Air Quality Monitor is super easy. Just plug it into a wall socket with the included power cable and follow the instructions on the Amazon Alexa app. If you opted in for Amazon’s Frustration-Free Setup during checkout, the Smart Air Quality Monitor will be linked to your Amazon account before you receive it, and will automatically connect to your WiFi network once powered on in your home.
If you need extra guidance on how to set up the Amazon Smart Air Quality Monitor, check out How to set up your Amazon Smart Air Quality Monitor.
What’s it good for?
Amazon describes its Smart Air Quality Monitor as a device that “makes it easy to understand what’s in your indoor air”. So when purchasing the device, my expectation of its usefulness didn’t extend beyond staying informed on the air quality in my home. It wasn’t until feeling the frustration of receiving multiple alerts of poor air quality without a clue on how to fix it that I realized the Amazon Smart Air Quality Monitor was mostly useless for me without an air purifier to accompany it.
The Smart Air Quality Monitor can be used to trigger an Alexa-enabled air purifier when the air quality becomes poor. This is the ideal way to use the device, in my opinion. Using the Amazon Smart Air Quality Monitor as a stand-alone device doesn’t provide much value outside of keeping track of your home’s air quality data.
Despite needing an air purifier to take action on the data provided by the Smart Air Quality Monitor, I felt the insights were interesting. For example, I learned something in my home that was consistently triggering a poor IAQ score due to high levels of VOCs. I wasn’t able to identify the source of the VOCs, but I’ve gained insight into the potential need for an air purifier.
Indoor Air Quality scores
The Smart Air Quality Monitor measures 5 factors of air quality: particulate matter (PM 2.5), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), carbon monoxide (CO), humidity, and temperature.
The Alexa app translates all 5 air quality factors into an easy-to-read Indoor Air Quality score (IAQ score). The IAQ score is tracked 24/7, which allows you to stay informed of air quality trends over time.
In addition to IAQ scores, the Alexa app provides insights into health effects and possible sources of poor air quality. The Alexa app also gives tips on how to improve the air quality in your home.
Our verdict
The Amazon Smart Air Quality Monitor provides a simple and convenient way to keep track of the air quality in your home. Its compact design and low price make it easier to place smart air quality monitors throughout your home. Air quality alerts and reporting in the Alexa app are useful to stay informed of what’s affecting your home’s air quality. However, the use of an air purifier is a must to take action towards improving poor air quality. Unfortunately, using the Smart Air Quality Monitor as a stand-alone device doesn’t provide much value beyond data insights.
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