Have you ever really wondered exactly how clean the air is in your home? There are a number of elements that go into having clean and healthy air in your living spaces. Thanks to today’s technology, you can not only monitor your home’s air quality, but also improve it. So, stick around as we take a look at the different types of smart home air quality sensors and how to use them to keep your home’s air fresh.

Introduction

Hi there and welcome to the Smart House. I’m your host, Ryan, the tech guy. If you’re passionate about making your home smarter and your environment healthier, then you’re in the right place. So, in today’s video, we’re going to dive into the world of smart home air quality sensors.

Sensor Types and Benefits

We’ll be exploring several key types of sensors: CO2 sensors, particulate matter, the U.S. natural gas, and ubiquitous temperature and humidity sensors. This is not a conclusive list of all the sensors that are out there right now, but these are some of the most popular ones. For each type of sensor, we’ll discuss why it’s important, and I’ll talk about specific models that I’ve got integrated into Home Assistant.

Practical Applications

We’re also going to look at some real-world examples of how to improve your home’s air quality through automation. This will give you a comprehensive view of how each sensor can contribute to a healthier home environment. So let’s get started.

CO2 Sensors

First, let’s talk about CO2 sensors. These sensors are crucial for monitoring the levels of carbon dioxide in your indoor environment. High CO2 levels can lead to health issues like headaches, dizziness, and even impaired cognitive function. It’s important to note that CO2 sensors are distinct from CO or carbon monoxide detectors, which primarily serve as a human safety device.

Product Highlights and Integrations

If you are interested in integrating your smoke and CO2 detectors in the home assistant, check out a previous video that I did on this. So, on the subject of CO2 sensors, the first one we’re going to take a look at is the new Aranet4 combination air quality sensor. Big thanks goes out to Aranet for sending me this air quality sensor and sponsoring this section of today’s video.

Practical Tips and Home Integration

They asked if I wanted to check out their new product and gave me complete freedom to create any video that I wanted. Very funny. The Aranet4 not only monitors CO2 levels but also temperature and humidity, displaying everything on this easy-to-read e-ink display. Now, if you’re not familiar with e-ink displays, it’s similar to what you find on a Kindle.

Concluding Remarks

The cool thing about e-ink displays is that they require very little power. They only consume energy when the display actually changes. With that, this sensor is actually battery-powered, so you can place it anywhere that’s convenient. This one’s been hanging out in my living room for the past few weeks, and my wife has actually taken notice of the CO2 levels. It has this built-in green, yellow, and red indicator to let you know when the CO2 levels get unhealthy.

Needless to say, we now have a lot more plants in our house, and our windows are open a lot more. Now, what really makes the Aranet4 stand out is its high precision, real-time CO2 measurements. This comes from its NDIR or non-dispersive infrared sensor, giving it high accuracy data. The sensor can also store 90 days of data onboard that you can access via the Aranet app or Bluetooth.

Now with that app, you can set up an alert, and if your phone is within Bluetooth range of the sensor, you’ll get alerted if CO2 levels or other values get too high. You can also use the built-in integrations in Home and home assistant to read the data consistently from the sensor. For example, my home assistant instance communicates with the sensor over Bluetooth, so now I can use that data to kick off automations.

Plus, the nice thing about home assistant is if your sensor is too far away for Bluetooth, you can always set up Bluetooth proxies which work great with the Aranet. I have a video coming out about Bluetooth proxies here in a little bit. Link up above. Now the home system integration seamlessly enhances the smart home experience by allowing you to take full advantage of all the data that the sensor can spit out.

Now, of course, there are other CO2 sensors on the marketplace. But I really think the Aranet comes in a really nice looking case, and it’s something that’s not going to be too disruptive off on your shelf.

Particulate Matter Sensors

Having covered all the features of the Aranet4 CO2 sensor, let’s turn our attention to another source of indoor air pollution: particulate matter. Talking about particulate matter sensors, these are essential for monitoring microscopic particles suspended in the air that you breathe. There are two main types of particulate matter sensors, differing based on the size of the airborne particles they can detect: PM2.5 and PM10.

PM2.5 refers to particles with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or smaller, often originating from sources like vehicle emissions, industrial processes, and wildfires. These ultrafine particles can penetrate deep into the lungs and even enter the bloodstream, posing serious health risks. On the other hand, PM10 particles have a slightly larger diameter, up to ten micrometers. These particles typically include dust, pollen, and mold spores, which can cause respiratory irritation and exacerbate conditions like asthma and allergies. But on the other hand, PM10 particles are less likely to penetrate deeply into the lungs but still present health concerns, especially for vulnerable populations.

To monitor these tiny particles, I picked up the Govee Life Smart air quality sensor off of Amazon. This unit is only a PM2.5, so it only detects those 2.5 micrometer particles, but it also measures temperature and humidity. And you’re going to see that in a lot of these sensors. This does still provide you valuable insights into your indoor air quality.

I was able to easily integrate it with Home Assistant’s built-in Govee Bluetooth integration. This allows me to trigger fans or air purifiers, enhancing my smart home setup. Alternatively, if you prefer a standalone function, you can set it up with the Govee home app where you can just read the data directly on your phone. You can also integrate it with Govee’s other products, like their air purification system.

Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs)

Moving on, let’s talk about another critical aspect of indoor air quality: Volatile Organic Compounds, or VOCs. VOCs are a significant concern when it comes to indoor air quality. These compounds typically are emitted from sources such as paints, cleaning products, furniture, and even some 3D printer filaments, like PLA. These can range from short-term irritation to long-term respiratory issues and even potential carcinogenic effects.

So monitoring the ozone levels is critical for maintaining a healthy indoor environment, especially around things like paints or other off-gassing products. And fortunately, there are smart sensors available designed specifically for this purpose. That’s why, about three months ago, I picked up the Aqara TVOC sensor. This sensor also has an e-ink display, giving you long battery life and communicates over Zigbee to Home Assistant.

So I’ve got mine set up with Zigbee to MQTT, which then puts data directly into Home Assistant. You can also check the parts per million temperature and humidity right on the display. It also has a nice visual indicator of air quality, but the number of leaves at the top of the screen, you can change this with a button on the top by double pressing.

Now, this VOC meter actually lives in my storage closet here in my office. That’s where my indoor 3D S1 Pro lives. It’s been interesting to see the amount of VOCs that get in the air when the printer is actually running.

Natural Gas Sensors

Quickly moving on, we’re going to talk about another type of sensor, and I would consider this one really more of a human safety device. This is a natural gas sensor, and these sensors are essential in homes that have natural gas appliances. This is critical for detecting gas leaks or if somebody actually leaves one of those appliances on. This is actually one of the sensors I really wanted to add to my smart home.

A few years ago, we had an incident where somebody didn’t turn off the gas stove completely. And when we came home, you could smell natural gas everywhere. Thankfully, it’s only been a few minutes, but it could have turned out much differently. So investing in one of these sensors is a good idea. If you happen to have gas stoves, fireplaces, dryers, water heaters, or an HVAC system that uses gas.

Obviously, if you have an all-electric home, there’s no need for it. It’s especially good for those who may have issues with their sense of smell because that’s the primary way that we detect natural gas in a home. So a quick search turned up this Tuya natural gas detector on Amazon. And this sensor provides quick alerts and I’ve got it integrated with Home Assistant via the local Tuya integration.

So not only does this detector sound an alarm if it detects gas, but you can also receive alerts in the app and monitor the gas levels within Home Assistant.

Temperature and Humidity Sensors

Now, finally, maintaining the right temperature and humidity levels is vital for both comfort and health. Sensors that monitor these conditions help manage your heating and cooling systems more efficiently and can prevent the growth of mold and mildew. You can also utilize smart plugs or infrared controllers to activate dehumidifiers in high humidity environments.

Now, interestingly enough, most air quality sensors already include temperature and humidity monitoring capabilities. So if you have any of these sensors, you might already have this functionality with one of those ones. Or through a smart thermostat. My house is just full of temperature sensors now, but if you’re looking specifically for a dedicated temperature humidity sensor, there are two main types.

Those with a screen and those without. In my house, we utilize the Aqara temperature and humidity sensors and also the SwitchBot outdoor sensor in areas where a screen isn’t necessary. In addition, I have one of the YoLink outdoor sensors monitoring my deep freezer out in the garage.

For more public areas, we prefer either the SwitchBot Meter Plus, the YoLink temperature sensor, and the Shelly H&T sensors. All of these devices integrate seamlessly in Home Assistant, allowing for easy inclusion in dashboards and automation setups.

So you truly can see what’s going on in each corner of your house. Humidity sensors are also valuable in places like basements, allowing you to detect water coming in because the humidity levels are significantly above that of the rest of your home. Now, if you’ve got any helpful insights out of today’s video, please make sure to give it a thumbs up. This helps the YouTube bots know that folks are getting good information from here and will show it to others.

And if you haven’t already, make sure you subscribe to the channel for more projects and product reviews. So now we’ve seen all the features of these products. Let’s take a look at how we can use that information in our automations and Home Assistant to have better air quality in our homes.

Automations

Alright. So quickly, let’s take a look at some example automations that we can do to improve the air quality in our house. So for this first section, let’s look at the basics, which is to create notifications. And of course, don’t worry about following along. I’ve got all of these automations listed out in a blog post that you can find down here below or in the description. So you just copy and paste those directly into your Home Assistant instance.

Now notifications may seem overly easy, but I’ll show you a couple of tricks in order to be able to reuse the same automation to both trigger notifications and also do other things like turn things on and off. Let’s start by clicking create automation, and then we’ll create a blank one.

Now, in a trigger, we’re going to go to entity, and this is important because you need to be able to select a numeric state for a value. That’s a number. So we’re going to click numeric state and for our entity, we’re going to do the living room sensor, living room CO2, carbon dioxide.

Now, below that, we have two options. We have one for above or below mode, meaning, if we have a numeric value that goes above or below a certain threshold, we want to trigger this automation. So let’s start out by saying if goes above 1500, which is the red indication on the net for, then we want to go and kick off something.

If we scroll down here under and if this used to be called conditions, we’re not going to have anything right now, but we’ll go back and modify this as we make it more advanced. So we’re to click Add action and simply we’re going to do notification.

Now, if you have different notification devices set up in Home Assistant, you’re going to see a bunch of options here. It’s not like other things like light where you use like light turn on. Each notification has its own service to send.

So I’m going to use my mobile app integration, which is the default one. When you set up the mobile app on iPhone or on your Android phones, you’ll get a notification service that you can use. So this one is called Default, for which I go to my fold for. Obviously, in our message, we just want to say.

And then under title which on Android you’ll see of the title the top we’ll just call high tools. So you can set up multiple devices if you want to see if you want to set it to your phone, your spouse’s phone, your watch, whatever. You can set up multiple ones there.

So obviously, that’s pretty easy, pretty straightforward. But let’s look at a couple of more advanced topics. So, say, for example, we wanted to send a different notification depending on the time of the day or different criteria.

So my previous example, I had said one of the options would be, Hey, open up a window with CO2 sensors. You really can’t run an air purifier if your CO2 levels are too high. You can open a window or just circulate air. So in this case, I’m going to send a reminder to say, go ahead, open the window.

So now we’re going to say add building block and we’re going to use the choose option here. What the choose option does is it allows you to set multiple items like a case would be in some programming languages where it’s going to check each of them in order.

And if it doesn’t fulfill any of those thresholds, it’s going to go to the default action. You can set different conditions inside of one automation. So it’s super powerful and I use this one all the time. So this was to be fairly simple.

So going to go under option one, we’re going to set a condition and we’re going to do an entity numeric state because I want to do a temperature value from the outside. So if I go here and I type in weather can select any of your weather options or you can do weather home, which I think is the built-in one.

Click attribute and set apparent temperature. So if the apparent temperature is above 50 degrees and say below 75 degrees Fahrenheit, then then it will send that notification. So I’m actually going to go up here using one of the new functions in the newer versions of Home Assistant. I’m going to click this and cut.

Then I’m going to come down here and go to add action and paste my existing action. Now, I can change this to say, Please open a window, and then even better, I can click Add action. We can do text to speech.

So going use the cloud service and I’m going to say my kitchen display. I’m going to use the exact same message as before. I see what else is detected. Please open a window and this is going to use the cloud service to go ahead and generate that text to speech incident to my Google home.

Now, one of the cool things here, so I’ll get these notifications if it’s between 50 degrees and 75 degrees outside, but what if it’s not? Well, then I’ll click add default actions, add action and paste back in my original message.

So high CO2 levels detected. But another thing that I could do is turn on a fan. Or even better, if you have a smart thermostat, you can activate your thermostat’s fan function and it will circulate air throughout your house.

So I’m going to look at action and we’re going to say fan turn on choose entity and my downstairs thermostat fan. This is my Nest thermostat, which I’ve got integrated through the HomeBridge integration, which I did a view on previously watching Fine up here,

That fan will basically just turn on and then if I needed to, I can go in here and set a lower threshold or it turns off fan automatically. But for now you kind of get the concept. If you want to get even more powerful, you could actually go in here and set different types of notification.

So you have one automation that would send alerts for all your different air quality sensors. So say, I wanted to add another sensor in here and use the same automation for both. I could click add trigger.

Entity numeric state, and we’re going to do our PM2.5 sensor. So right here so we can see if that attribute, if, if the value goes above, say 50, then trigger this automation. Now of course what it’s going to do is trigger the exact same automation again, because I don’t have either conditions, but I can go in here and actually create a separate condition for each of these.

So for the same thing, I could go in here and take this condition take going to cut it from clipboard and home. I create a new condition and we’re going to use the and and then we want to go add condition and paste that back in there.

To make this. And then we want to say add condition and then we’ll do entity numeric state again and we’ll do that the same sensor again. PM2.5 if it’s above 50.

So now we’ll go in and change this from saying CO2 levels detected. So now I have a condition here where if the temperature is between 50 and 75 degrees outside and the air quality sensor is above 50, so it has triggered here but then met the condition here.

So I know it’s the PM sensor that triggered it, not the CO2 sensor. Then it sends a custom notification for just the PM2.5 sensor. And then of course all I would need to do is just duplicate this option, which there’s a cool trick. Now you can do it here, you can click in here and say rename. So we’re going to rename this one to say if.

Below 75 F and PM2.5. So now when you collapse this, you can tell what that exact choice is going to do. So we’re gonna click duplicate just like you do before.

And instead of having the air quality sensor above that, we’re going to change this to the CO2 sensor and of course change that to 1500. Now we’ll just modify these again. So there we go.

And now our default actions are really not going to work because it would always come up and say, hi, CO2 levels. So So now what happens if it’s above 75 degrees and one of these sensors goes off? Well, because I have this set for default actions, it’s going to always run this, even if it is a CO2.

So in that case, all I have to do is create other conditions that are exclusively the PM2.5 above its threshold, or the CO2 above its threshold and then delete the default actions.

That way it will catch those two additional scenarios because it goes linearly. It goes option one, True false. Option two true false. Option three true false. And all the way down. All right, So now I have the three options in here.

So if it does fall in the nice degrees outside with either one of these two, they’ll activate first. Then if it’s a CO2 sensor that activates, it’ll go off and send the notification.

And if the PM2.5 sensor activates without being inside of the nice temperature range, it will activate number four and then by default it’ll turn on the fan.

If you have your air purifier directly integrated with Home Assistant, it’s super easy. that as an action, if one of your PM sensors or another sensor goes too high.

So if you have a dumb device like a dehumidifier that doesn’t have a directed immigration with Home Assistant, then you can do something as simple as setting it up with a smart plug. One thing to do on smart plugs is make sure that you check the rated wattage on the back of the smart plug.

To make sure your device isn’t going to exceed that. So something like a dehumidifier heater or air conditioner might exceed the rating of the smart plug. You plug it into. So you might need to upgrade to a larger, heavier duty smart plug.

So to set up an automation, all we really have to do is come back in the Home Assistant Click Create automation at Trigger. Again, we’re going to do entity in Numeric State.

And see if we’re doing a dehumidifier. In this case, we’re going to go in and we’re going to set a humidity. So I’m going to find one of my humidity sensors. Let’s do the one here behind me.

So I’ve got the meter, which is the one you see back here. It’s value. And I want to see. So if it goes above 60%, we want to turn on the dehumidifier.

Obviously, you can set other conditions in here, a time of day, an outside weather condition, what have you. But for this illustration, we’ll make it fairly simple.

I’ll click Add action and then we’re going to say switch, sort of go in it and click switch, turn on, click choose entity. And we’re going to select outdoor.

Energy Plan, which is this new one I’m testing from YoLink right now. The cool thing about some of these plugs is they also provide power so you can see exactly if the device is on or off, which we’ll look at that here in a second.

So simple as that. And then I usually like to add an alert here. So we’ll say again, we’ve got a simple notification less now it’s turned on.

Now, of course, if your dehumidifier is extremely simple and when you plug it in, it turns on you’re good to go. If you’ve got something a little more complex where a button needs to be pressed or you need to use a remote to turn it on, then consider using something like a SwitchBot bot that can press that button.

Or you could use an infrared repeater or emitter device similar to what you find in the Aqara M2 hubs or the SwitchBot hubs. especially the SwitchBot Hub two, You can now create those infrared controlled devices and expose them over matter, easily adding them in the Home Assistant.

So again, in this example, it’s I’m assuming it’s a dead simple dehumidifier. When it’s plugged in, it turns on. Okay, So that’s extremely simple. But what happens if we want this to turn off automatically when it drops below a certain humidity threshold?

In that case, all we have to do is go up here and actually delete and instead of using numeric state, we’re going to use the standard entity and state since we’re going to react any time it updates.

So this is good because we want to make sure we’re actually checking it more often so that way we can set an automation. Of course, you could create two different automations, one to turn on, one to turn off. But I like to simplify things, so each time the new episode changes, it’s going to trigger this. So of course we don’t want it turning it on all the time.

So, in that case, we’re going to go back to our friend and choose under building blocks. So under option one, I’m going to go to conditions. So here in a condition then to click add condition, let we go to entity numeric state and then again we’re going to look for office humidity. So again, we want to trigger if this turns on to above 60 and then under actions, we’ll just take the turn on, cut it and paste to here under actions. Same thing with our notification. Cut that and paste it here in action.

Advanced Notification and Automation Setup

So again, this will be high humidity. And then to do the same thing for low humidity, we want to shut it off. Let’s go ahead and click the three dots, duplicate it, rename it to ‘low humidity.’ And then instead of saying above 60, we’re going to delete that and we’re going to say below 40. And then from ‘switch on’, we’re going to change this to ‘switch off’. And then of course, we want to change our notification. And there we go.

So now that I’ve got my high humidity and low humidity values set, we can hit ‘save’. So now, any time the humidity goes above a certain threshold, it’ll turn on that plug and each time it drops back below to 40, it’ll turn off the plug. Pretty simple and pretty easy to set up.

Of course, these are just some basic examples. You can get as crazy as you want with automations, but hopefully, this gives you a kind of a great concept on how to use these different functions, especially in the new version of Home Assistant, where they’ve made the automation builder so much better. You can drag and drop, copy and paste. It’s gotten a ton better.

Closing Remarks

As we’ve seen today, integrating smart home sensors into your home can significantly enhance safety, comfort, and overall well-being. Whether you’re monitoring air quality, detecting natural gas leaks, or maintaining optimal temperature and humidity levels, these sensors provide invaluable insights and enable intelligent automation.

By harnessing the power of your smart home, you can create a safer, more efficient, and more enjoyable living environment for you and your family. And if you’re interested in checking out any of the products I talked about today, I’ve got links to everything in the description and the included blog post for today’s video.

Another big thank you goes out to Aranet for sending over the Aranet4 sensor. Make sure you go check these out. We’ve actually been using the sensor quite a bit in our house to check CO2 levels. It’s giving us a whole new insight into our home’s air quality. And like I said, we now have a lot more plants.

Make sure to use our discount code ‘THIS SMART HOUSE 5’ to save 5% on the sensor. Now, if you’re looking for more smart home projects, then check out this post I have right over here. If you haven’t already, make sure you subscribe by clicking our logo right here.

Thanks for making it this far and I’ll see you in the next video.