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Awair’s new air quality monitor has some smart home tricks up its sleeve

Clayton Moore
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The San Francisco company Awair is one of the best-funded developers in the smart home market, so it makes sense that the company’s latest product is the product of some very smart ideas centered on smart home principles, design, and function.

The Glow C that hits the market on Wednesday, July 24, is the latest iteration in Awair’s line of popular air quality monitors, but the company has built in a lot more functionality this time around, enabling the device to function as a smart plug, a motion sensor, or simply a really cool customizeable night light. Let’s hit the high notes one by one.

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First: Air quality. Awair’s air quality monitors are some of the most sophisticated available on the market, so you can trust its prime functionality for sure. The new Glow C tracks three key factors that influence the quality of the air we breathe.

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These factors include a wide range of chemicals know in the trade as volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, which originate from all sorts of sources including burning fuel but can also be given off by simple household items like paints, copy machines, printers, and, counterintuitively, air fresheners, among other consumer products. In the short term, they can cause irritation of the eyes and lungs, headaches, and dizziness, while long-term exposure to VOCs can cause organ damage and cancer. Naturally, we want as few of them polluting the air as possible.

The Glow C also monitors temperature and humidity, two factors that come into play when we find out that the device can also act as a smart plug, enabling it to control non-smart devices automatically. For example, if the Glow C detects that the temperature of your home is too high, it can automatically turn on a fan that is plugged into it. Conversely, if the Glow C detects the humidity of your home is too low, it can turn on an attached humidifier.

Awair’s mobile app can generate a color-coded and numeric Awair Score, ranging from 0 to 100. The app also uses machine learning technology to lear from the user’s habits and lifestyle preferences and make recommendations based on what it learns is most important to its owner.

But wait, there’s more. Airwair’s latest and greatest gizmo also has a built-in motion sensor that can be programmed not only to illuminate the device with its built-in lights, but also to alert the user through push notifications or simply trigger when movement is detected in the place.

Finally, users can also change the LED color of their device. In its most basic settings, the LED light shows green when the air quality is good, yellow when it’s fair, and red when things aren’t cool, but Awair says that users will also have the ability to customize their light settings to align with their preferences and preferred color palatte.

The Awair Glow C is now available at getawair.com for a launch price of $80. Breathe easy, everybody.

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Clayton Moore
Clayton Moore
Contributor
Clayton Moore’s interest in technology is deeply rooted in the work of writers like Warren Ellis, Cory Doctorow and Neal…
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