Mini-Review: Airthings Wave Plus
An Air Quality Monitor. Measures radon. Has pretty charts. But stop changing the data.
After doing some research on air quality monitors, I ended up getting an Airthings Wave Plus. Not for any good technical reason, but because of a sale at my local hardware store. This led to more detailed investigation into radon, and I ended up getting radon mitigation in my house. I sleep much better now that the radon is gone.
Pros
✅ Measures radon, in addition to other items. My radon was bad. I was able to take action and get it fixed. I also ran a long-term 10 month radon test kit at the same time, but it was nice to confirm with a second source. The Wave Plus shows updated readings every hour so you don’t need to wait.
✅ Your cloud account has the data. For tracking long-term trends over time, this is useful. I can log in and view, slice, and filter. I don’t need to do anything. It just happens.
✅ The charts are pretty. The UI is slick and looks nice. That makes me want to use the app, website, and tool more.
Cons
⛔ Does not measure PM2.5. This was the top thing to measure across several sources in my research. I am disappointed that the Wave Plus does not measure this, and looking back I would choose a different product. But: My radon was a problem. And fixing radon is likely more urgent.
⛔ Your cloud account has the data. I prefer to keep my data private. You can download your data as .csv, so that’s something.
⛔ The charts sometimes change shape, and show different data, depending on how far back you look. If I set the app to show me the last 48 hours, the chart shows one shape. If I then tell it to show me one week, or one month - the data changes. Suddenly the numbers will be different. It might show me a CO2 level of 2,000, and then claim the same reading on the same day was actually 1500 instead. Which is it?
This is frustrating because I expect that the data and reading is actually the same, and should not change.
For some elements like Radon, I can understand that the calculating may change over time. You have do a bunch of complex math to back-calculate and figure out what the level really was. The device wants you to gather two weeks of data before you can be confident of the radon reading.
But for items like CO2 - just tell me the level. Either the reading was 2,000, or it wasn’t. Don’t force-round the graph, or try to claim it was something different. Show me the consistent data all the time.
I shouldn’t have to download the .csv and muck with Excel to see the real readings. Just show me. That’s the whole point of having an app and a dashboard - so I don’t have to do it myself.
Overall the device has served me well. If I could travel back in time I would get the model that measures both radon and PM2.5, although it is more expensive.
For now - I did need to fix my radon problem, and I spend a lot of time in the basement. So I am grateful to have that fixed. It was a good investment.