Awair is a line of smart technology-enabled air quality sensors that provides feedback regarding the quality of the air in your home or office. Here’s our Awair review.
What is Awair?
Awair comes in several different design styles, including the standard Awair unit (about the size of a digital alarm clock), the Aware Glow sensor with integrated power plug, the Awair Baby edition that’s specificially designed for nurseries and kid’s rooms.
All Awair units come with some sort of visual feedback to alert you of the air quality in a particular room. Awair and Awair Baby feature a digital readout on the face, while Awair Glow has a color-coded light that indicates the overall air quality.
Awair Features: How Does It Work?
Each Awair device contains a diverse array of sensors designed to detect different substances in the air around it. Sensors can detect ambient temperature, humidity levels, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, what types of chemicals are present, and the amount of dust present as well.
All this data is then displayed on the front of an Awair or Awair Baby device along with a number, from 1 to 100, indicating the overall air quality, with 1 being poor and 100 being excellent.
The Awair Glow device, which is more compact, doesn’t have a detailed digital readout but instead has an LED light that glows from red to green to indicate relative air quality. Awair Glo also does double-duty as a nightlight, and it can be programmed to activate any device that’s plugged into it – such as a humidifier, an air purifier, a portable heater, an air conditioner, or even a fan or a lamp – whenever certain air quality criteria are met.
Awair devices are equipped with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technology in order to configure and set. These devices also have several different settings that are ideal for judging air quality in regards to specific activities such as sleeping or working or for specific conditions such as being allergy-prone or for children and their sensitive lungs. Additionally, these devices can be paired with other smart technologies like the Nest thermostat or Amazon Alexa to fine-tune your environment.
Awair offers a free companion mobile app for both the iOS and Android platforms.
Who Makes Awair?
Awair is a product created by a company founded by Ronald Ro and Kevin Cho in order to provide greater feedback in the quality of the air near Ro and his newborn daughter, as Ro had suspicions that contaminants in the air his daughter was breathing might be contributing to her eczema.
First founded in 2016, Awair is based in San Francisco and is currently developing additional smart technologies to help provide tools and feedback to families and businesses when it comes to the quality of the air around them.
Awair Materials
The base Awair unit is made from 100% toxin-free natural materials and is set in a box made from North American walnut timber. The front grille features a perforated face fitted with LED indicators to provide visual feedback of the five different data points plus a 1-100 overall air quality score.
Awair Baby models replace the wood case with a non-toxic copolymer one for better durability around children. The smaller Awair Glow has wood on its top, inlaid around the integrated LED nightlight.
Awair Pricing
The base Awair unit costs $199. The special edition Awair Baby is $179, and the more compact Awair Glow is $99. The base Awair unit is also offered through Amazon and can sometimes be available at a slight discount.
Awair Reviews: What Do Customers Have to Say?
The base Awair unit (which is identical to Awair Baby except for the color of its case) has a very respectable 4.1 out of 5 star rating on Amazon across 193 customer reviews. 61% of those reviews were from customers leaving 5-star feedback, indicating an overall excellent reputation.
Pros:
Excellent for Detecting VOCs – The ability for Awair to detect volatile organic compounds (VOCs) suspended in the air has been praised by physicians and air quality experts who have purchased and reviewed it personally. The VOC detector has good sensitivity and the detailed information available through the Awair app provides feedback in parts per million, which is highly accurate for measuring toxicity.
Cons:
Temperature and Humidity Sensor Criticisms – Some have found the temperature and humidity sensors slightly inaccurate, with the humidity sensor sometimes ranging as far as plus or minus 11 percentage points. However, as these two factors aren’t necessarily contributive to air quality, this has been seen as a minor problem at most.
Should You Buy Awair?
Awair has very good reviews from a number of highly informed customers that have used the devices and verified their accuracy against professional-level air quality sensors. This makes Awair an excellent option for anyone who is concerned about the air quality of their own home.
Additionally, the company that makes Awair is constantly updating device software, making it more accurate and adding additional features that provide more functionality. If you have the cash to spend on an Awair, it seems to be a good choice.
