Originally published at: https://breathesafeair.com/apollo-air-1-review/
I’ve said this many times recently – I guess I’m on a good streak – but the Apollo AIR-1 is an indoor air quality monitor I have wanted to get my hands on for a while now. Needless to say, when it finally arrived in the mail a couple of weeks ago, I was over the moon to finally get the chance to experience the device firsthand. While the device may not look particularly special at first glance, some aspects stood out from the first time I visited the Apollo Automation website. This leads me straight to a key point…
Thank you for a very comprehensive and well written article.
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Thank you for the heads-up! There appears to be an issue with displaying the images from the original post here: Apollo AIR-1 Review - A Fun and Feature-Filled Air Quality Monitor
I think since the images are from a different URL, they can’t be displayed here. I will look into the issue and see if I can remedy it for future posts.
Based on Ethan review I have 2 AIR-1 and an QP Lite. All have temperature and humidity completely wrong QP+ 3.2 degrees Celsius one of the AIR-1 -2.1 and the other one -2.9. Humidity also 10-15 lower. But my feeling is that co2 and pm 2.5 are completely wrong on AIR-1. This resulting of a useless product and I would suggest to stay away form this product. This is a shame because they seam to be very nice guys. I need to mention that one AIR-1 I place it outside and I calibrated manually (shows ~200 ppm less than QP Lite), the other one I did not calibrated (shows ~260 more). When it comes tom PM2.5 AIR-1 shows 21.5 and PQ Lite 16 (I tend to believe that this is the right value).
QP Lite I never had to calibrate co2 sensor has a battery + display + a good app also integrates with home assistant so really no point of choosing AIR-1.
Hi @telebog,
Thanks for joining the forum!
Out of curiosity, could you share some comparisons of the readings from the two devices simultaneously? The AIR-1 has good components (minus the gas sensor), so I would expect it to provide good readings. I would be happy to look into this further with you.
Because I am a new user I can only attach one photo. I will write the measurements.
In the test I used 2 Air-1, Qingping lite (offsets: -3.2°C, +10%RH), Mi Temperature & Humidity Monitor 2 that I have for more than 3 years and seams to report reliable measurements. Outside temperature ~2 °C, inside ~20 °C. I did the measurements in the morning 9:30 AM. We have a power plant ~1km away that is using coal/gas and between October and March in some days during the night rise the pm 2.5 quite a lot (can go to 100 or higher), this is the reason the pm 2.5 outside in my tests is so high. I stayed away from the devices while I did the readings.
Test 1: I opened the door from the balcony and I placed the 2 Air-1and qp lite in the door. Waited 20 min and manually reset the co2 of the 2 Air-1, qp lite showed 403 ppm. After another 5 min the measurements are:
Air-1 f6 : 414 ppm, 59.4 pm2.5, 6.7 °C, 45 Humidity
Air-1 be: 436 ppm, 49.5 pm2.5, 7.2 °C, 44 Humidity
QP Lite: 403 ppm, 32.0 pm2.5, 6.9 °C, 52 Humidity
xiaomi : 7.8 °C, 51 Humidity
Test 2: I closed the door from the balcony and I placed the devices inside, waited until the measurements stabilized on all devices ~10 min and did the measurements:
Air-1 f6 : 1357 ppm, 25.1 pm2.5, 22.8 °C, 46 Humidity
Air-1 be: 1478 ppm, 22.2 pm2.5, 22.5 °C, 47 Humidity
QP Lite: 1458 ppm, 17.0 pm2.5, 17.2 °C, 68.6 Humidity
xiaomi : 19.8 °C, 63 Humidity
Test 3: after more than 5 hous:
Air-1 f6 : 1252 ppm, 18.0 pm2.5, 25.1 °C, 45 Humidity
Air-1 be: 1341 ppm, 17.2 pm2.5, 24.9 °C, 46 Humidity
QP Lite: 1260 ppm, 12.0 pm2.5, 21.6 °C, 62 Humidity
xiaomi : 21.3 °C, 62 Humidity
You can see that there is a big difference between the pm 2.5 between the two air-1 and also very different from QP lite. Also there is a difference between the 2 Air-1 in ppm inside. The temperature and humidity are totally wrong. If I set the offsets in the Home assistant I can get good measurements inside at around 20 degrees and around 60 humidity, but once this goes very low the measurements will be wrong. So temperature and humidity are useless on this device. Pm 2.5 are not reliable either, and 1 out of 2 devices reports co2 lets say correctly.
Sorry about the permissions error - I totally forgot about that. I appreciate you taking the time to write down all of the measurements.
There is quite a significant PM difference between the sensors and this is quite interesting to me. While the AIR-1 monitors report relatively similar readings most of the time, they also have quite some deviation. This is within their stated specifications, but it’s surprising how much higher than the QP they read.
While there are very few studies with the Grandway sensor used in the QP, I would actually be more inclined to believe the AIR-1 for PM as it uses the Sensirion sensor which is much better tested (and has more studies covering it). With that said, the Sensirion sensor, as with many low-cost PM sensors, tends to overreport, so the truth could be somewhere in between. Here are my own findings when I tested the device:
I’m unsure if Apollo is using any kind of correction, but if they are, it’s possible that the humidity is influencing the readings as humidity plays a large role in accuracy when it comes to low-cost PM sensors. I also found that the temperature and RH readings could be quite different from reality, so I agree with your findings on these two parameters.
As for CO2, I still think there is somehow a calibration issue playing a role here. NDIR sensors are pretty good these days, and even across different devices I usually get very similar readings. For the same device, they should be very similar!
Any idea how to calibrate co2 sensor? I allready tried manually for both the same time? For QP Lite I never calibrate manually. To be honest I let it stay at the window a few times at the begining. And I think there is more than a month since it stayed only inside (usually it will not go bellow 800 ppm) and measurements seams consistent.
For the Qingping? I don’t have mine on me at the moment, but I believe there is a setting for it in the app.
If it hasn’t been below 800 ppm for a month, there is a chance that it has auto-calibrated which could impact accuracy. With that said, it still read pretty similarly to the Apollo AIR-1s, so I don’t think this is the case (at least, it didn’t have much of an impact).