Only a day ago, Sensibo announced their first fully-fledged air quality monitor, the Sensibo Elements, so it comes as a surprise to see that Aqara too has now announced their own device to monitor your air, with the succinctly named ‘Aqara Air Quality Monitor Panel S1’.
As you may have guessed, as this comes with a full-sized LED display, it matches the other products the company make as part of the S1 lineup, which includes the Scene Panel S1, The MagicPad S1, the recently released Magic Switch S1E, and the Aqara Thermostat S3.
Aqara already has a simple sensor that measures temperature and humidity, as well as their TVOC sensor, that measures VOCs, so what does the newest product measure? Well alongside the now ubiquitous temperature and humidity, it fills in some of the gaps left by the two aforementioned products, with a PM2.5/PM10 sensor, and CO2 (carbon dioxide) sensor.
As it’s part of the S1 lineup, the display itself is full colour and is designed to fit the typical ’86-style’ switches found in China (and the UK?). This means it’s permanently wired as you would expect of a wall switch, and as far as we’re aware, requires a neutral wire.
The PM2.5 component uses an industry-standard laser-based particle sensor in combination with a fan to assist in the sampling of the air, whilst the temperature and humidity sensors use compensation algorithms to adjust for any impact the device has on the readings, to ensure higher accuracy.
The S1 also has Aqara’s own built-in voice assistant, Xiao Qiao, although it only speaks Mandarin of course, and uses Zigbee 3.0, as is the case with most Aqara products.
The bad news – as you might have gathered – is that it’s currently only available in China, with the double whammy that we’re informed it’s only going to be made available to installers, not the general public. With this being the case, we don’t have a firm idea on the price just yet. On the flip side, we’ve seen products like this eventually make their way to resellers anyway, regardless.
Thanks to Eric at wave.tech for the tipoff.