these 10 sensors right here improve my life in ways that I didn't even know was possible plus some of these have some really surprising features that you're definitely going to want to see starting right here at my desk using a sensor I didn't even know I needed you see up until recently after I had been at the desk for a while my mind would get a little foggy I would start working slower or sometimes not at all to fix this I tried drinking more water standing up and even drinking the poison actually none of those
things fix the issue but the new sensor on my desk detected what was wrong turns out it was too much CO2 in the air you know the stuff that I'm breathing out I was not aware that when there's too much CO2 in the room cognitive abilities can drop 10 to 50% and this isn't just some madeup statistic every time the CO2 sensor would go to a high level my mind would feel foggy and it would work slower it's crazy how accurate it is I've been trying out a bunch of different air quality sensors and six
of them can monitor CO2 that's the errant for air gradient Apollo air litics air things and ecobe premium which is different than the rest because it doesn't start with the letter a and you can see how fast these sensors can detect the CO2 I promise that poor air quality reading is just extra CO2 and not bad breath guys I promise seriously all those six sensors integrate nicely into home assistant for automations and I'll share which sensor I recommend buying at the end of the video I would definitely stick around to the end because I'm going
to share a a few extra sensors packed into devices like the Apollo that are going to blow your mind but one of the sensors stands out for monitoring CO2 on a desk it's the erant 4 the reason why is that it's very small and it has an e in display that shows the CO2 level is a big easy to read number plus there's a little indicator next to the colors to let you know if the CO2 is too high and it runs off two AA battery so it can sit anywhere on the desk here's what's
interesting unlike the other sensors that connect with Wi-Fi the a 4 connects with Bluetooth so if you worked at an office that has low ventilation you could bring it with you and use it really anywhere outside your house besides temperature humidity and pressure this only measures CO2 so if you want a device with even more sensors the other options will be better and I'll cover those in a minute and show you why they're useful okay measuring CO2 is great and all but how can I have my smart home really help me out well I set
up an automation if the CO2 is past the threshold level and I'm on my computer the light strips behind my desk flash red and the fan under my desk turns on and the ceiling fan turns on to max speed this gets a little air circulation in the room when I leave the door open as I take a quick break and after I come back the CO2 levels have dropped significantly and the fans have automatically returned back to normal I love this and I've been so much more productive thanks to the CO2 sensor but this is
just my office where else could I use air quality sensors to improve my life first is in the bedroom where the magic happens the magic of air quality sensors of course so you might have heard of voc's they stand for volatile organic compounds and they come from everyday items and some are non-harmful but others can cause problems some of the problems caused by voc's could be sleep disturbances headaches or sore throats the reason I think this could be good to monitor my bedroom is because sometimes Ali and I have these symptoms while we're sleeping you
know we're not moving around much the air is running less because it's at night so the air is more stagnant so what are voc's well they usually come from sources that have a strong smell like paint disinfectants cleaners pesticides permanent markers and those kind of things of course these aren't just in the bedroom they could be more present in the bathroom or other areas of the house and what's crazy is V's from earlier in the day can linger at bedtime so having an alert for a spike in high voc's could help you identify the source
then you can open up the window with a fan on to get some fresh air okay so here are the sensors I've been testing that can detect voc's and what's cool is normally ecobe or the E room air quality sensor will just show a rating for this metric and not go much further but when those are integrated in a home assistant you can have access to the exact numbers for graphs and automations very useful oh and you know how I mention the CO2 levels rising at my desk well the same thing can happen while sleeping
especially if the air is not running so what could be helpful is an automation to kick on the HVAC system in the middle of the night if the CO2 levels get too high here are some devices that measure both vocc and CO2 and don't worry I'll share my detailed comparison table at the end with all the juicy details I wish I would have known more about these sensors earlier because I'm sure I could have avoided problems in the past especially in the winter time when I'm not running the air in my bedroom at all and
I have those headaches and sore throats at night so voc's are bad but there's another air pollution type that's even worse I'm going to tell you all about that and which sensors can track it in just a minute today's video is sponsored by Panasonic now that it's heating up here in Arizona I'm running my air conditioner all the time but I still want to have good indoor air quality you see having clean air helps you stay healthy because there's less bacteria and viruses in the air but it's so hot outside I'm not opening up a
window anytime soon and letting out my precious AC and you might not know this but your indoor air quality might be five times more polluted than the outdoor air that's why Panasonic has several ventilation Solutions including its energy recovery ventilators these help turn your bad stagnant air into clean circulated air through ventilation purification filtration and circulation this helps keep your home energy efficient while staying well ventilated and all of Panasonic's fans are high performance including the whisper green select ventilation fan these fans have some interesting smart home features like Tech that can tell you your
current IQ scores and sensors that can control the fan based on motion and condensation levels if you're wanting to improve the ventilation in your house this is a great place to start check out more info about your IAQ options link below and thanks to Panasonic for supporting the channel okay so you want to know what freaks me out particulate matter or PM and this could be a mixture of dust particles dirt or liquid droplets in the air this is serious because it can knock years off your life cause heart or lung problems bronchitis asthma attacks
and all sorts of nasty stuff seriously I think I know too much because I'm kind of scared of the air now what are you looking at never seen a get a bubble before you'll see a number next to the PM like PM 2.5 and that's just the size of the particulate matter that it's measuring so 2.5 micromet is 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair so pretty tiny in the kitchen it could be broiling frying grilling using gas stoves or one slice of Allie's toast what come on anything lighter than this is
just bread not only that but it could be coming from things that you do often and not even realize like burning candles incense air fresheners or even mold can cause that number to rise plus devices like 3D printers can also be a factor here are the devices I tested to have particulate matter detection this number normally should be really low if it does go high you might think oh just go open up a window but that might not be a solution because the outdoor air could be even worse I feel like I keep giving more
and more bad news in this video but if you want data on your outside air well air gradient has an outdoor sensor that gives you accurate readings to use and automations so if the outside air quality is bad and a door or window is open you can get an alert to close it or if the air is good outside then it will tell you to open it and we get really bad dust storms here in Arizona you know those walls of dust you see in the movies yep that's my backyard it's basically Mad Max back
there sometimes I just blindly open up a window when the temperature is nice outside without thinking about it so having sensors help prevent me from doing something dumb will help improve my life I'll definitely be testing this sensor and all the others long term so make sure you're following the Channel all right now for the good stuff I've gone through all the devices I've tested so far but some of them have some extra sensors built in that take them over the top I'm going to move rapid fire through the sensor so here we go first
the Apollo mtr1 not only does it have a CO2 sensor but it also has a millimet wave sensor that can detect multiple zones what there's even a little RGB light and it can Tech UV and ambient light of the room look how tiny it is it's crazy that they can pack all of that into such a small device and the price is not bad at all Apollo also makes more air quality sensors that are supposed to be pretty good too you might have heard of people building their own air quality sensors and adding tons of
features well imagine that but you can skip the hassle and just buy it that's the atics ES1 this is packed to the brim with sensors and it can even sense nitrous oxide Dio oxide plus it can detect sound I'm really impressed with how well this works and I hope this small company is able to grow more popular air quality sensor is the air things wave plus it's really expensive and I'm not a fan of the look takes batteries or it can be plugged in for power but this is the only sensor that I know of
to detect radon from what I heard radon doesn't just come and go like the other air pollutions that I mentioned earlier either your house has it or doesn't so I don't think it's worth getting especially for the massive price tag on the opposite end if you want to get an inexpensive sensor that uses zigg then check out the Ikea bendri bisri I this is a good one for just dipping your toe in air quality but it is going to be missing most sensors like CO2 all right here's a table of all the sensors and what
they can detect pause if you want to look at it longer and all of them except for the Amazon sensor integrate nicely into home assistant if I had to recommend one sensor overall that's tough but I would go with the air gradient there's a couple of reasons why one I like the look it has LED lights at the top to give you a quick glance at the current air quality state next is the OLED display that shows all the important info right there on the device it's really easy to read if you don't want to
look at the dashboard and what's cool is that you can use this with or without home assistant enabling the cloud allows you to control update and view the dashboard as a standalone device so really anyone can use this air gradient is really big on being open sour source so you don't have to worry about your device not working down the road I love that and the icing on the cake is how serious air gradient is with the sensor accuracy they're using highquality sensors and making sure there's enough airflow and space to measure correctly plus it
has the nitrous oxide dioxide sensor that is missing on most the other devices it's really difficult to verify and compare the accuracy of these sensors but for my brief testing the less expensive sensors were a little less accurate so you kind of get what you pay for in this space but if I had to trust a sensor for accurate readings air gradient would be at the top of my list to me the sensors that can detect CO2 are the most helpful because that's helping me every single day and I definitely didn't know I needed it
but now I don't want to live without it it's great to see air quality sensors becoming more popular and it's been eye openening to learn about all these sensors I'll definitely be making more automations with air quality sensors so hit that subscribe button if you haven't already thanks for watching hey um yeah I think I know why the voc's are spiking oh yeah it's uh the dirty diapers right maybe but I think I found a much worse culprit guilty
