Ikea Vindriktning Air Quality Sensor Review and Accuracy
airgradient.com
airgradient.com
With a Wemos D1 mini (ESP8266) MCU that costs around USD 2.00, you can pretty easily make the Vindriktning WiFi connected and get the data to a backend [1].
You just need to solder three wires, and there is enough space within the enclosure to fit the D1 mini inside.
This would then allow you to get the exact measurements and to better understand if the "green" is more on the lower end or the higher side.
[1] https://github.com/Hypfer/esp8266-vindriktning-particle-sens...
Are there any non expensive sensors you could recommend? I care about the indoor air quality but it gets very pricey. I have Awair at home but it covers only one room and the unit runs $300 a piece :(
1. https://www.adafruit.com/product/3686?gclid=CjwKCAiAhreNBhAY...
If you don't want to buld yourself, there are a few relatively good non-connected PM 2.5 sensors for example the "SmartMi PM2.5 Air Quality Monitor" that I can recommend. It costs around USD 30 here in Asia.
https://www.seeedstudio.com/Grove-Laser-PM2-5-Sensor-HM3301....
Most of them (including the awair) are complete crap.
I found one that seems okay and is also one of the cheaper ones.
I use and like this one best: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DHXQXGK/
Simple screen with relevant details, no crappy 2.4ghz wifi, no crappy app, etc. it just works.
I’d be curious what report you saw, last I looked the consistency of the results wasn’t even that great either.
When I owned one they only had some proprietary quality score and how it related to PM2.5 or AQI was not listed.
https://www.airgradient.com/diy/
Components:
Wemos D1 Mini USD 2.24
Wemos OLED display USD 2.47
Plantower PMS5003 PM Sensor USD 13.89
Senseair S8 CO2 Sensor USD 28.00
SHT30 or SHT31 Temperature and Humidity Sensor Module USD 2.55
It's hard to know how good the products will be long-term, but the app and charting is pretty good. You can download reports via their web dashboard. I've turned off all notifications except for the CO2 monitor. The ePaper screen is legible, but the text is a little rough around the edges.
Here's what it tracks:
- Radon
- PM 2.5
- VOC
- CO2
- Humidity
- Temperature
- Pressure
I will say that the View Plus is Airthings most expensive product. If you don't care about PM 2.5 or Radon monitoring, they have significantly cheaper options.
> It can be seen that all three sensors correlate very well but that the Vindriktning only shows about 65% of the PM2.5 values of the other two sensors and thus seems to considerably understate the air quality.
I think here you mean "overstate the air quality" right? Or "understate the air pollution"
If the sensors have been calibrated in software, wouldn't you get the uncalibrated values?
Currently in Bay Area where air outside seems good but these apartments seem poorly ventilated, old fixtures, old floors, lots of electronics, etc.
The sensor is only accurate to +-20uG/m^3 this also means it can never reach a reading of healthy air according to the WHO specs... I think that is a bigger issue that the traffic light UI.
Apologies for picking on this issue. I am very thankful you took the time to create this article and look at the all the specifications.
There's nothing dynamic on the page (in fact, on most pages on the site). It's mostly text and images, a user doesn't need to run your blobs of code to see them.
I'd like to add that:
- The VINDRIKTNING is extremely consumer accessible ($11.99, good build, simple traffic light system).
- It may be put into spaces that previously had no particulate air quality monitoring.
- The spouse-acceptance-factor is extremely high (unlike e.g. a couple of circuit boards wired together off of Aliexpress).
There are other consumer friendly offerings, but they aren't affordable (e.g. Amazon Smart Air Quality Monitor 4x cost, Airthings 10x cost). That being said, IKEA could fix their traffic-light system's cut off points for free and should consider it.
Which circuit boards do you recommend that have high accuracy that can be ordered?
We also experienced with more expensive ones e.g. from Sensirion but did not really measure a significant advantage compared to the Plantower.
For example expecting to consumers to have a 3D printer and know how to use one would preclude it from my definition by a lot. Let alone needing a breadboard and to manually solder on components onto it.
Accessible is walking into a store, putting a reasonable amount of money down, and plugging the thing in. Then providing output anyone can understand without training or expertise (e.g. traffic lights, smiley faces, etc).
I wish there were standards around thermostats these days. If there were, then people could sell gizmos that measure PM 2.5, then (if the windows are closed), use it to set the speed of the variable speed blower in central air furnaces accordingly. This would cut our electricity usage by at least 20-30% during fire season.
(I’d love to see a legal mandate for interoperability in this space.)
Mine was a 3.5 ton HVAC, I replaced it with a five head, five and a half ton "mini split"; while the split air has had it's share of issues (like, I got a full refund of the purchase price a few months ago due to manufacturing defects of the copper lines), I prefer having air handling done bear the ceiling and using 20x20x1 inch filters on box fans (or fancy filters if those are your style) on the floor. The mini split has the inverter driven motors everywhere, and is completely silent during normal use.
I have two AQM, and occasionally one or the other will register high CO2 or whatever and I will open a couple of windows and run exhaust fans (built in to the home) to cycle the air, it takes about 20 minutes. The main furnace style system did no filtering or air quality management.
but if you do want 'accessible' in your sense of the word (pay some money, get a working assembled unit), AirGradient does sell assembled units. And can provide a back-end system for remote monitoring if you would like.
See this link under the low noise mod heading
https://github.com/Hypfer/esp8266-vindriktning-particle-sens...
If you want real evaluations, SCAQMD (the folks in charge of air quality for southern california) do evaluations of commercially available, low cost sensors, both against reference instruments and the lab.
See http://www.aqmd.gov/aq-spec/evaluations
You can see what i said is true from the table - lots of sensors that are very well correlated with reference instruments in the lab, but suck horribly in the field.
I would think you would be better off submitting the sensor in question to them, and letting them put it through its paces.
(They publish within a month of finishing testing, and testing takes ~8 weeks)
With inexpensive optical scattering sensors, the situation is even worse. While it is easy enough enough to "count" individual 2.5um particles, the scattering equations work out to an order of 10^6 reduction in scattering amplitude, per particle, going down to 0.3um (when measured with red or infra-red light), and different particle compositions will scatter differently. On top of that, the number of particles increases significantly per unit mass concentration, making the signal processing a lot harder once one can't just threshold individual "blips" in the signal.
Whether the sensors are particle counting or nephelometric in principle, the basic trade-off is that to see smaller particles, they need higher amplification factors, which in turn increases thermal noise, also amplifies stray light, and makes the device more sensitive to EM interference. Many signal processing pipelines do simplistic noise filtering, throwing out much of the baby with the bathwater.
On top of these principal difficulties, the optical scattering type sensors are quite sensitive to temperature variation, and aging of the photoelectronic components, which is why field tests under varied conditions often depress their accuracy even further.
Long story short, it is very easy to build a sensor with qualitatively good correlations to actual PM concentration, as long as the PM concentration is sufficiently high, but the health effects have no threshold, and every added bit of pollution counts, starting at zero. Unfortunately, commodity PM sensors are quite bad at quantifying these low, yet meaningful, ambient pollutant levels, which is probably why IKEA chose their traffic light thresholds the way the did: not because of how it relates to health, but because this is what they could do with a $12 device.
To summarize their current results: Purple Air (especially version 2) is the only one that doesn’t suck at measuring PM 2.5. None of the consumer-targeted gaseous sensors they tested work.
Did I miss something? Is some other third party running more comprehensive tests?
Atmotube pro Elitech (for PM2.5) Purpleair
The field evaluations have good expositions of the underlying data in slide form. For sure the purpleair is the best bet that i can see. Note that they are pragmatic as well - if you read field evaluations, AQMD folks generally think >0.8 R^2 is very good. Which probably makes sense comparing a $50-$250 device to a several thousand dollar reference instrument.
Note that one serious issue is that a bunch of the sensors aren't just uncorrelated, they are often dramatically undercounting. It would be one thing if they were dramatically overcounting, and told you air was horrible when it wasn't. But they are actually telling you air is fine when it isn't even close to fine.
I actually went down the same path as OP about 6 months ago. I have used a dylos meter in my old woodshop, and was building a new one, and wanted to see what the the best thing to do was. After a bunch of looking, i found these folks. I am not aware of others doing this breadth of testing.
(It turn out the dylos meter is either accurate, or overcounts, depending on temperature/humidity. This is actually acceptable since it won't tell me things are good when they are bad, but it also turned out the purpleair was consistently good for the same price :P)
I've noticed that even being exposed to pure carbon dioxide the sensors I have will increase the counts of CO, VOC, and HCHO, which is unlikely and a false read.
I only care about CO2 for my devices, so my two $30 sensor based devices are fine.
I don't have a problem with the OP's analysis of the Ikea sensor. It seems generally reasonable. But rather with their implication that the DIY sensor being promoted is of higher quality.
Because accuracy is very much a "finished product" implementation issue, not just the sensor itself, such implication is off-base, particularly in direct comparison to any finished commercial product. The accuracy of the DIY version is going to vary -- a lot -- depending on the builder of such.
I wonder if AQMD would evaluate a "reference build" of the DIY sensor, seeing as there is an enclosure as part of the "reference" implementation. At bare minimum, the airgradient site should have comparison to highly ranked (by AQMD) sensors, such as purple air. I'm actually quite surprised there are no such comparisons on the site.
It requires minimal technical expertise, no 3D printing, no soldering, and minimal configuration.
It’s a noble mission, and I find the granularity of data for both pollution and temperature far more telling than the estimates of more centralized systems.
Check out the map and guide here:
It basically always reads 0 if the AQI is anywhere under 200, and pretty useless.
I wonder if there is a better I2C sensor that I could use?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08W8KS8D3?&linkCode=ll1&tag=andro...
We love seeing the innovation going on in this space - any suggestions on how we could better support this growing awareness of the value of IAQ?
Gold star if you sponsor an independent test of this solution to verify its effectiveness.
Bonus points for explaining what matters in terms of testing.
Self-serving (which is OK in this context) points for explaining how your product mitigates the problem by demonstrating the DIY metered results.
I'm actually more driven/interested in data/compare it to other folks, but I don't have a clue what does it mean for my health. What's the difference between PM2.5, PM10, PM1, PM0.1. What is TVOC (as in sensor description: benzene,etc Volatile organic compounds), HCHO (is for formaldehyde). How do I measure them (parent expands on these questions), what are the "norms" and, most importantly: WHY should I care about those values?
Then ofcourse tips on HOW to decrease those particles. That's where filter comes in, yeah. First time someone said he just slaps filter on an air ventilator, I was like: "Wow, it's SO simple? Yeah, sounds logical"
1/ lots of medical studies cover benefits of better iaq
2/ filter design is well described in academia and by filter makers (grade of media chosen, pleat type, system specs)
For both, we could do some education modules if we did this.
How big of an award gets attention?
$1k for the best? $500 for runner ups? Testing for all?
Can you/your friend point out what kind of lovelace widget is that? Named: Our VINDRIKTNING chart after normal cooking, that helpfully has 3 gradients (green/orange/red)?
Thanks.
I have a question about precision: If the precision ±20μg/m³ - isn't it actually normal that they "extend" the green led up to 35μg/m³ then? Because that 12μg/m³ is maybe 32? Uh, looks like not even PMS5003 can reliably show you that green line with a high confidence, doesn't it?
Btw here is a nice thread that shows you how to wire it up with Wemos D1 and connect to Home Assistant. People compare their readings with other meters, too. But someone says he bought multiple of those and even those show different numbers. Someone sees IEKA values 10x higher (for lower values, but within specified accuracy) than other sensor https://community.home-assistant.io/t/ikea-vindriktning-air-...
But at least they FOLLOW the plot of more accurate sensors. I see value in that. I want to know if air purifier helps something or how much it helps.
It is possible that your air filter shakes or vibrates enough that it's kicking dust up, or you have poor indoor air quality. How often do you have to replace filters and how dirty are they? For reference I live in a forest, with pollen and dirt dust and people and pet dust, poor seals on windows, and open doors/screens, as well as high humidity year round; I buy the 3M 1000-1500 filters which are pretty beefy, and they last about two months before becoming uniformly dark grey on front and back. Ideally I'd replace them monthly but they're about $15 each and that adds up across three filters.
I ask because I don't think my system does anything for VOC, I don't use carbon filters for the three, so I'm mostly filtering dust, pollen, clay, etc.
So I haven't had chance to change filters yet.
Yeah, but it has high outgoing airflow, so I suppose it shakes up dust for me. It changes to red pretty fast when starting to cook, then hours, hours to bring it down.
Also, Airnow.gov still has a published scale that is worse than the IKEA product. https://www.airnow.gov/aqi/aqi-basics/. Green is 0-50, Yellow is 51-100, Orange 101-150, and Red 151-200.
So I’d guess most air sensors on the market aren’t necessarily classifying their readings into green-good / red-bad, or at least come with a now-outdated chart. Are there sensors that have been released and/or updated to match the new guidelines already?
Yes in many places in Europe or North America, the outdoor air quality is most of the time good.
However -unfortunately- there are also many places where the outdoor air quality is very unhealthy most year round and then an annual exposure to 35 μg/m³ vs 5 μg/m³ makes a big difference.
1) Report all alarms as detected. Eventually, the device becomes a red LED which users learn to ignore.
2) Report a problem when the device is reasonably sure there is a problem. Green light does not necessarily mean that the air quality is good, but when the LED becomes red, it should be taken seriously.
Two years ago, during one of the most intense fire seasons in California, I spent a few hours studying different solutions, and ended up buying a refurbished PurpleAir sensor. It seemed to work great, but I felt it was a bit too expensive for what it was doing, too bulky, and in general not as easy to use for the ordinary person as it should be.
Same problem with home air filters - if you want to purify the air in your house, there's too many snake-oil solutions out there, and few that are worth the spending.
Wirecutter has decent-ish tests of air filters, though they assume tiny New York apartments, so you have to dig around a lot to find results for larger units.
(From reading their review, you’d think >1000 sq ft homes are unheard of in the US, but the average is closer to 2000 sq ft)
You can still use it to get a rough idea of your air quality and it is definitely "better than nothing (or not having it)".
With the right filter and sensor, you can keep your AQI in the single digits consistently and react appropriately to particle buildup. If you have a CO2 sensor as well you can react to CO2 buildup which is something I have experienced plenty of times in a modern apartment (not necessarily dangerous levels but levels high enough that cognitive effects should be expected). It is hard to keep indoor CO2 levels anywhere near outdoor levels without forced ventilation with the outside or living in a large house.
MPR 2800 furnace filters for the box fan contraption. 3M makes good ones. Your furnace might not appreciate how much they slow down flow.
IQAir monitors are unreasonably expensive and IOT nonsense, but still good.
There are threshold laws in the US and Europe. There are laws from OSHA that regulate where you work - but no laws that regular where you sleep! It's all driven by money, of course...material with lower formaldehyde cost more to manufacture. Just walk into a Sherwin Williams and compare their paint. The highest ones are eco friendly "Low VOC" (volatile organic compound) - so industry definitely knows about it.
The numbers in my house were effectively off the charts and OSHA would be closing down your employer if you had this exposure at work.
Remediation for this is essentially allow to off gas, keep windows open. Off gassing also is impacted by humidity, so may be low during winter but high in the summer or when it rains.
Air filter DOES NOT fix this. The amount of air moved by a HVAC is peanuts compared to just opening windows for a few minutes.
California has regulations: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/composite-wood-prod...
Did you get a measurement done, and if so where do you go to get that?
They generically measure "VOC".
The only reason why I knew of this is because my wife is from China and it's more regulated (kinda funny, isn't it?) and people know to let their house breathe before moving in. Otherwise I'd be celebrating our "new house smell"...which would prob linger for months and months in an average American home since families don't like to open windows.
My sensor was working fine for a few months. It’s located near the area I smoke, so whenever I’m smoking it changes to red quickly. And after a few minutes (10 or so) it’d go back to green.
But for past few weeks it’s stuck at red. I disassembled it and cleaned the intake hole (which is covered with a fabric) and it worked after. However it went back to displaying red again all the time.
So my question is whether this sensor needs frequent cleaning? If so what are the alternatives?
Sometimes it helps to blow compressed air inside to push out any dust that might cover the optics but that also often does not help too much or only temporary.
I only ask because it seems to me (with no concrete research) that the smoking risk is much greater than generalized air quality risk.
I have a Dylos rigged up inside my apartment, feeding particle measurement data to a serial port, which stores the data on my own cloud. I don't bother with AQI.
I've always returned to the Dylos sensor as the gold standard
Another good review of sensors: http://www.aqmd.gov/aq-spec/evaluations/summary-pm
> We currently ship approximately 1-2 weeks after receipt of payments. Delivery takes 2-3 weeks to most destinations (North America, Europe, Australia).
We currently have kits in stock and ship within a few days of orders received.
Shipping times really vary depending on destination and are hard to predict but 2-3 weeks is a good estimation.
> Amber: 36-85/OK + Medium
> Red: 86- /Not good + High
I absolutely despise this pattern. You could not pick a worse set of colors for the most common form of color blindness.
+---+ +---+ +---+
| | Good | | Fair | * | Poor
| * | <-- | * | <-- | * | <--
| * | | | | |
+---+ +---+ +---+It basically always reads 0 if the AQI is anywhere under 200, and pretty useless.
Outside it measures around 400ppm so the base point is good. Inside it measures 480ppm with good ventilation. When someone farts it goes to 2000ppm for a while. So I think it measures 'alright'.
Convincing reasons exist to think that significantly lower levels than are acutely unhealthy have long term health impacts. On top of that, you don't really need a sensor to know whether or not your air has particulate levels that are acutely unhealthy, you just know it.
If you don't care or only want to know if your air is quite bad, sure, buy one of these. I don't think it's a reasonable level, but you do you.
CO2 is important because it is a proxy for how much air you are rebreathing. This is especially important because of Covid. If you have a few people in a poorly ventilated room co2 will climb. Whereas in a well ventilated room, it might be nearly as good as being outside.
Even for just being at home this is important because if the air is poorly ventilated it will feel "stuffy". It can affect how well you are able to think and work.
Most air quality meter's only measure pollution, and you have to get an expensive one to measure co2 which is why it is frequently omitted despite importance.
Effects of low-level inhalation exposure to carbon dioxide in indoor environments: A short review on human health and psychomotor performance https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041201...