Help! I’m about to launch headfirst into home air quality management, and what I want to do is repurpose tablets to always display air quality throughout my house in graphical form, specifically a floor plan of my house showing each room as green or red depending if one sensor value is out of whack. I’ve seen pictures of an Airthings Business dashboard (below) that might do the trick, although it’s still not clear if that dashboard could be used with the home sensors, or if the regular dashboard has the same option, and what exactly triggers the color change.
I think I would rather use AirGradient sensors, so I’m curious if the same type of thing can be done with AirGradient, or if there is another product or software that does what I’m looking to do.
Hi @dcpmark, thank you for joining and fantastic question! This isn’t something I see mentioned very much.
As for Airthings, I can’t confirm with certainty, but I can’t see this option in my dashboard. As such, I believe it may be a feature that is limited to the business dashboard.
As for AirGradient, yes, this functionality is possible. Please keep in mind that I do now work with AirGradient (since they aligned very closely with my own transparency beliefs). I just want to make this super clear!
Below is a screenshot of the menu which lets you create ‘displays’. You can choose which monitors to show, and you can even show outdoor/indoor averages if you want to (this is great for showing outdoor air quality vs a specific indoor monitor).
You can then customise your display with some basic styling options. My example shows my name because I’m using an admin account, but your will just show the name of the monitor’s location as well as the parameters you selected earlier.
Once complete, you will get a link like this: AirGradient. This link can be shown in a browser on your tablets, or it could somehow be implemented another way as it’s easy to embed.
While this is the only display option that’s currently available, there are plans to launch more designs in the future.
Another option to consider - especially if you’ll be setting up lots of sensors and tablets - is to use Home Assistant. This is a bit of extra work, but many monitors support Home Assistant. See the below post if you’re interested:
In my Apollo AIR-1 review, I share some screenshots of my own HA dashboard, but it’s important to note that there is near limitless customisation here. While it does take an extra piece of hardware and some tinkering to set up as per your preferences, this is by far the most powerful option for a setup such as the one you want.
Please let me know if you have any further questions!
Thanks for the detailed answer! This is just gonna send me further down the rabbit hole to find EXACTLY what I’m looking for.
I did find this HA YouTube video as a starting point, but I’m not sure how to make the rooms show green or red depending if a sensor value is out of whack.
I understand the rabbit hole - I spent days researching HA when I first set it up! That said, it’s absolutely worth it, as there’s so much power and potential in the platform. Even now, I’m diving further into the rabbit hole as I believe my Raspberry Pi is overheating, so I’m looking into cooling solutions for it!
The video you shared is a much better (and more advanced) implementation than what I’ve done, but this is an absolutely fantastic idea. I love the idea of having a floor plan and then colouring the rooms based on air quality. What would you base the room colour on? Perhaps CO2?
If you use Home Assistant, you could also go much further and set up a range of automation depending on the air quality. But as you said, that’s diving very deep into the rabbit hole!
Well, my hope would be that any out of range value from ALL sensors….CO2, VOCs, PMs, etc….would trigger the room color change from green to red. The sensor that was triggered could be displayed in the room as well, or at least you could drill down to actual values of all the sensors to which one is causing the color shift to red.
If you do manage to implement this at some stage, I would love to see. This could potentially be the best integration of air quality monitors with Home Assistant that I’ve seen!
