From Award Winning, to 'Not Recommended'. The flawed indoor air quality monitor review by Wired

[ljane888]

I want to be like AirGradient when I grow up! You responded to that review with grace and aplomb, which I guess is easier when you have a great product and live up to your values.

Thank you for the survey. It made me think about how I choose which products to buy. For me step 1 is reading a lot of what is out there, even if it is fluff. While that gives me a general sense and helps me figure out what questions I may not have thought to ask, the value of that information is much lower for me. It’s like reading wikipedia to figure out what “real” sources I should check out next, but it does help me cross some options off my list.

Step 2 is digging into the details of products on the shorter list. Honestly I don’t know much about the technology in AQM, so those details were unimportant to me in choosing AG. TBH, I think it was more about the “soft” details: I’m a fan of both open source and community-driven products, I like to tinker, I appreciated the openness, honesty and helpfulness I saw when reading through the AG website and forum, etc. It was a while back, but my main criteria were probably a well-built product that was not going to end up in a pile of no-longer-wanted tech and the ability to integrate with Home Assistant.

I recently had a conversation on the difference between companies that sell products to make money and companies that sell products to make the world a better place. The latter is not compatible with the capitalist notion of growth at all costs.

[Al_ag]

I agree with the review that the display can be improved, but that’s not a good reason to give a not recommended rating when others are recommended with fewer features.
The display and other parts should be available to purchase separately for situations when parts break like the one mentioned in the review.
I would like to add some more recommendations for the display in the next iteration:

1. Bigger display so more sensor data can fit like the other PM sizes that the sensor measures but that is not shown on the physical screen. I find myself looking at the LED row more than the display because it’s so small. CO2 and PM readings are ok size, but the others like temp and humidity are too small. The next gen display should be at least 50% bigger both in width and in height.
2. I notice the display flickers sometimes. I saw it flicker in some of the reviews too. I normally don’t see flicker but on this display i notice it. Even though it’s small it can be irritating sometimes since the unit is sitting on my desk. Flicker free display would be a good upgrade.
3. The row of LEDs is great at the top. It would be good to have another row so we can have a row for co2 and a row for pm2.5, or maybe we can have the one row that is in two sections of 5 leds each that can be programmed to display one or two types of measurements.

[34trefdoi]

I am very happy with the indoor and outdoor sensors that I have bought. I have recommended airgradient in the past and would not hesitate to do in the future.

There was one part of your argument that I did not agree with however. You were unhappy that other monitors were recommended, even though they lacked a display or CO2 sensor. As a consumer, when I buy a product, I am not going to subsequently complain that it is missing something. If however, I buy something and one of the features breaks, this is a big deal.

Personally, I would not go to Wired for a serious review of anything (and for air monitors I used smartairfilters, who were up front about their partnership with air gradient).

As far as how to handle the situation, I don’t think that there is a lot that you can do, but I believe that the number of people who rely on Wired as their only resource for product reviews can be counted on the fingers of one hand. I am pretty sure that consumers will take the top few search engine hits for “air monitor reviews 2025”.

My take away from reading the review was that if a faulty screen was the only problem, I need to look at another review which takes a serious look at the product, describes their methodology and provides some long term conclusions. As we know, the aggregate view of reviews is overwhelmingly positive.