The bottleneck might be the air in the room

Re:The bottleneck might be the air in the room by microtonal on Saturday July 04, 2026 @04:58AM (#48783879)

Two tips: if you want a stationary CO2 meter in a room, you can make one very cheap with a SenseAir S88 sensor (22 Euro) and hooking it up to an ESP board. Flash ESPHome and you can get live statistics in your Home Assistant dashboard. The S88 is a pretty good optical NDIR Sensor that auto-calibrates by putting it in the outside air or in a well-ventilated room every N-days (N is in the data sheet). A bit more info about hooking up the S88:

https://danieldk.eu/hardware/smart-home/esphome-senseair-s88

If you want something with a display that works on batteries without spending over 200 Euro for an AraNet, the SwitchBot Meter Pro CO2 is pretty good option. It is regularly on offer below 50 Euro. It uses photoacoustic NDIR, but does not deviate a lot from the S88. You can use it without a SwitchBot by configuring it with a phone on Bluetooth. The meter works on external power and battery, but even when on battery, you can set the reporting interval to 5 minutes, which is good enough in practice. The meter broadcasts the measurements with Bluetooth LE, so if you want to get the data in Home Assistant, you can place a ESPHome Bluetooth LE Proxy in the vicinity [1]. This is an ESP32 flashed with ESPHome that listens on Bluetooth LE advertisement and forwards them to your HA instance over WiFi. Of course, you could also get the SwitchBot Hub, but what is the fun in doing that? :)

I would avoid the Ikea ALPSTUGA, it uses a thermal conductivity sensor, which is a very indirect method for measurements and it's often several hundred ppm off.

https://esphome.io/components/bluetooth_proxy/

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Re:The bottleneck might be the air in the room by bjackman on Saturday July 04, 2026 @05:13AM (#48783975)

As a middle ground I can also recommend this unit: https://apolloautomation.com/products/air-1

Looks like it's increased in price unfortunately but I like the idea, it's basically just what you would do as a DIY project but ready built. So you can either use it like a normal commercial product, or you can just fork the ESPHome config that's on GitHub and flash it exactly like any normal ESPHome project.

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Re:The bottleneck might be the air in the room by microtonal on Saturday July 04, 2026 @05:34AM (#48784094)

Yeah, I have heard good things about them. There are some other options that are kinda in between DIY and a product, like those by Screek Workshop.

https://screek.io/ https://shop.screek.io/products/sco-b

No recommendation though, I haven't tried them.

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Re:The bottleneck might be the air in the room by bjackman on Monday July 06, 2026 @08:47AM (#48803847)

Great to see there are others doing the same.

It's a extremely cool that ESPHome is able, just by existing and being good, to create this little industry of no-bullshit products. What an awesome project that is!

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Re:The bottleneck might be the air in the room by dgellow on Saturday July 04, 2026 @05:05AM (#48783935)

Thanks for mentioning that, last week I got 2 SwitchBot hub mini, 3 temperature sensors each, for 70€ total, they are really neat. Even put one in our fridge, I didn’t expect the signal to pass but it’s working :)

Will look at adding the CO2 monitoring

Edit: actually, they only sell them as part of a 6-in-1 device, with a display, and a bunch of other sensors. That feels overkill, I wish they would just sell the CO2 sensor itself

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Re:The bottleneck might be the air in the room by ac29 on Saturday July 04, 2026 @05:07PM (#48789112)

I have a SwitchBot Meter Pro CO2 that is just temp/humidity/C02. Works well and was inexpensive ($50 or so).

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Re:The bottleneck might be the air in the room by dgellow on Sunday July 05, 2026 @04:33AM (#48792359)

Do you mean that one? https://www.switch-bot.com/products/switchbot-meter-pro-co2-...

I wish they would sell just the CO2 meter, like this one: https://www.switch-bot.com/products/switchbot-indoor-outdoor...

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Re:The bottleneck might be the air in the room by originalvichy on Saturday July 04, 2026 @11:30AM (#48786111)

I would recommend Ruuvi Air, its sensors are high quality, and is quite open for devs to do pretty much whatever with it. Works by broadcasting sensor data over BLE, so if you have a smartphone or a home assistant server with BT connectivity, you can display or store the data live. The iOS app sends alerts when different custom thresholds are crossed, like for co2 ppm.

They do have a gateway product, but it’s not necessary if you have HA. If Apple homekit routers supported BLE as source it would work seamlessly in the ecosystem, but a bridge software is required on HA.

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