Air quality monitor for smart homes

This fall — thanks to some allergy issues — I spiraled out on a research topic of assessing my home air quality. And now, this winter’s LA fires has many more people talking about air quality in general. Thanks to, ah, science, there’s no need to guess: there are dozens if not hundreds of air quality monitors available on the market.

After my research spiral, I chose a small, affordable air quality monitor that is Apple HomeKit compatible, fits into my Smart Home automation journey (mostly), and has a solid app. Let’s dive into the details.

Qingping Air Monitor Lite

Qingping is a Chinese manufacturer of smart home devices: see their company website and the Amazon company page to get a sense of the products they offer. The Air Monitor Lite (company product page), Amazon product page is a poorly named product given the heft of its features. In a small, palm-sized box, it monitors 5 metrics: CO₂, PM2.5, PM10, temperature and humidity.

I was particularly interested in the Particulate Matter (PM) metrics, which assess dust, allergens, and smoke. Find a great discussion on PM at the US EPA website on Particular Matter (PM) Basics, including what they are, the potential harms they cause, and how to reduce them.

Performance

After jumping the typical new-device-setup hoops — get the app, get the device connected to your wifi network, etc. — the Quingping worked as expected. In particular:

• The device is charming, small, with a clear and simple UI: a swipe along the top moves the screen from metric to metric. The metric itself ‘bounces’ around in a charming way, likely to prevent screen burn in.
• The native app is simple, easy to use, and clear. You can see you data over the past hour, day, or 30 days. It’s easy to request a data export and receive an excel spreadsheet of the last 30 days; great data portability.
• The integration with Apple HomeKit is straightforward and works well. As a sensor, the device doesn’t directly appear as controllable in Apple Home. Instead, most of the metrics — temperature, humidity, and a combined “Air Quality” score — are bubbled up to Apple’s top line metric chips. Oddly, CO₂ is not, although you can ask Siri “what is the CO₂ level in the bedroom.” You can also easily define automations, like turning on an air purifier when the air quality drops below ‘good’ or ‘fair’ or ‘poor.’
• Although CO₂ isn’t directly reported in Apple Home’s metric chips, you will receive a warning notification when it is high.

A few oddities:

• The Qingping Air Monitor Lite has a rechargeable battery with a reported 7 hour lifespan, but in standard operating mode you’ll have it plugged in all the time. The battery mode might be useful if you wish to temporarily monitor another room for a few hours, because it’s auto-timer turns itself off after a few minutes. You can change that in the native app’s configuration settings.
• It has a sleep mode, useful for bedrooms to reduce light, but sleep means the device isn’t recording data any more. You can change the sleep schedule in the app configuration, too.

Sidebar: the shocking impact of a gas stove

The biggest shock to me was the impact of my gas stove on air quality. I’m a home baker, and running the oven for a few hours quickly raises my home CO₂ to levels above 2,000 ppm. What’s a healthy CO₂ level? It’s not entirely clear — see the OSHA guidelines for safe levels in work environments, which uses a ppm over time value (link). ASHRAE has a position document on indoor carbon dioxide, which notes research is not cut and dry.

Regardless, I’m working to keep mine under 2,000ppm by venting the kitchen and house when I cook.

Privacy

One of my non-functional requirements in my smart home journey is “Privacy: no data is leaked from house devices to the Internet.” Well, for sure this device violates that principle. Here is Qingping’s IOT privacy policy, and in summary (thanks, ChatGPT):

1. Collected Data: Qingping gathers account details, device information, and usage statistics from its products and apps.
2. Purpose: Data is used for service improvement, troubleshooting, and personalized user experiences.
3. Storage Location: Data is stored securely on servers, with specifics depending on regional laws (e.g., within user jurisdictions).
4. Third-Party Sharing: Limited sharing occurs with trusted service providers for operational purposes.
5. User Rights: Users can manage, delete, or request their data under applicable privacy laws.

So, yeah, seems broad enough for me to assume all my air quality data is being stored in China. Oh well. My friend David recommends configuring my network to block outbound traffic, but then I’m rather sure I won’t get air quality history in the native app, which queries the remote servers and not the device. I don’t really use that function often, so perhaps on a “home security” day, I’ll tighten this up.

All in all, this has been a great smart home device. It’s provided immediately useful information to me that has led to some new home ventilation practices.