On my journey of building a smart home with Home Assistant, one thing I've been really interested but haven't made much progress on is air quality monitoring. I have some simple temperature sensors deployed to nearly every room and that's interesting, but I'm interested to know about particulates, VOCs, etc especially when fire season hits in the summer.

I tried the Aqara TVOC sensor and it was pretty disappointing. VOCs by themselves aren't enough and the sensor was pretty flaky at least with Zigbee2MQTT. It would just completely stop reporting data until I reset it, which I did a number of times. Eventually I gave up.

I had known about the AirGradient for a while, but after seeing it in action on Smart Home Solver's channel, I finally decided it was the right product for me.

Overall I'm quite happy with it. It's only been about a week, but it definitely feels like it's going to fit my needs. I was blown away by how high the CO2 levels were in the house. I'd really like to get an outdoor model as well so I can compare inside and outside, to see how well my filters are working.

Pros:

• Excellent Home Assistant integration, with 100% local control
• Option for DIY or pre-assembled (I went with the pre-assembled)
• Updates very frequently. Just breathe on it a little bit and the CO2 sensor responds immediately.
• The display is small, but perfectly usable
• More air quality sensors than I was expecting including CO2, PM0.3, PM1, PM10, PM2.5, VOC, and NOx
• LEDs go from green to yellow to red for a quick read on overall air quality. The LEDs are pretty bright at night. They can be disabled easily enough though.

Cons:

• Higher price than I was hoping for
• Shipping from Thailand was $25 and took 2 weeks
• Set up instructions were a little confusing. I had to search around a bit in order to find the default password. I was surprised there wasn't a quick start guide included in the box.