The air in your home is just as crucial to your health and comfort—here’s how to monitor it, and why you need to.
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The quality of the air you breathe has an enormous impact on your health—poor air quality is linked to a host of health issues, and is believed to be responsible for millions of deaths globally every year. And it’s not just physical health—there’s growing evidence that poor air quality can negatively impact your emotional and mental health, as well.
While you might pay attention when the nightly news or your weather app flags poor outdoor air quality, you should also be paying attention to indoor air quality. Americans spend about 90% of their time in their homes, after all—and the air quality indoors can be exponentially worse than outside. If you want to protect yourself, monitoring your home’s indoor air quality (IAQ) with a monitor is a good idea. Here are some of the best ones you can buy right now.
Best simple monitor
The SAF Aranet4 Home is a small, battery-powered air quality monitor that you can easily move from room to room with you, or take with you when you travel to monitor the air quality in hotel rooms and other spaces. The battery life is terrific (up to four years) and the app is straightforward and easy to use. It monitors carbon dioxide (CO2), temperature, relative humidity, and atmospheric pressure—but not particulates in the air, like dust. If all you want is a simple and portable monitor, this is a terrific choice.
Best for information overload
If you find the volume of data being dumped into your head every day overwhelming, the PurpleAir Zen is perfect: This air quality monitor uses a simple color code to tell you how the air is at any given moment. A soft green glow means everything is good; yellow means it could be better; orange means folks with sensitivities or health issues should be careful; and red, purple, and violet mean the air is dangerous. You can use it indoors or outdoors, so you can see at a glance if the air you’re breathing is dangerous or not.
Best budget monitor
If you want to track the air quality but you’re not looking to spend hundreds of dollars, this nifty model from Ikea, of all places, is a great choice. It tracks particulates in the air as well as volatile organic compounds (VOCs), showing you at a glance how dirty the air around you is at that moment. While it’s designed to be hooked into Ikea’s smart hub technology (and can be paired with an Ikea air purifier for a total air-quality solution), it works just fine as a standalone.
The Airthings View Plus offers a comprehensive overview of your indoor air quality, measuring radon, particulates, CO2, VOCs, as well as temperature, humidity, and air pressure. The radon monitoring is a great extra feature, as radon is almost undetectable unless you’re looking for it. There are some minor downsides: It must be connected to both the internet and an app on your phone or tablet to work, and the display is very small, so it can be hard to see what’s going on from across a room (though you can always just look at the app).
Best multi-functional monitor
At a relatively inexpensive $150, the Qingping AQM offers a lot. It measures particulates, CO2, temperature, and humidity—and noise levels, which is a tangential air-quality issue most monitors skip over. It also displays the weather, so you won’t need a separate app or device for that, and it even functions as a clock and can set alarms. If you want an air quality monitor but don’t want more devices cluttering the house, this one is the way.
Best easy-to-use monitor
Most monitors require some setup and calibration. If that scares you off, the Qingping Lite is your best choice: Just turn it on and it starts working. It’s small and simple, showing a color-coded bar and some basic data points. You can connect it to smart home platforms if you want, but it also just works out of the box. It’s under $100, too, so it’s a great starting point for monitoring the health of your indoor air.
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