AWAIR Glow C Air Quality Monitor REVIEW | Mac Sources10

Awair Glow C simplifies air quality monitoring and controls “non-smart” devices to instantly optimize your air health

AWAIR is a company that strives to empower its customers with knowledge of what is in the air their breathe. The company’s goal is for people to be healthy and thrive in their environment. To that end, they design products that are stylish for home or office use and powerful enough to detect fine dust and chemicals in the air all around you. Today, the Awair Glow C joins their product family as a way for people to “control the health and ambi a nce of the space around them like never before.”

Awair Glow C Brings More Color to Intelligent Air Quality Monitoring

The latest air quality monitor from AWAIR also functions as a smart plug, prompting “non-smart” devices such as humidifiers or purifiers to react to changes in indoor air quality. Its classic, clean design blends seamlessly into any environment. As an added bonus, users can now change the LED light color, hue, and motion settings of their device to transform it into a customized smart night light. Awair Glow C has an MSRP of USD $89, but is now available in the US and Canada for a discounted launch price of USD $75.

Keeping an Awair Glow C in your home can help you understand how environmental changes are influencing your symptoms and determine what steps to take to get relief. Glow C tracks three key factors that influence air quality — chemicals (VOCs), temperature, and humidity — and monitors changes over time. It takes air quality monitoring one step further by turning on connected “non-smart” devices when one or more of these factors becomes unhealthy. For example, if Glow C senses that the temperature of your home is too high, it will automatically turn on a fan that is plugged into the smart plug. Similarly, if humidity levels become too low, Glow C will turn on an attached humidifier.Users can schedule when Glow C should react to air quality readings and when to conserve energy by customizing their device preferences in the Awair app. Glow C easily integrates into a smart home ecosystem and is compatible with Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and IFTTT. With the growing popularity of IoT technology, Glow C is the perfect solution to create a healthier living environment with the help of voice-command control. Glow C is automatically programmed to show your air quality status at a glance via the LED light, with a green light indicating good air quality, yellow indicating fair, and red indicating poor. Users have the ability to customize their light settings to align with their preferences and desired color palette. The built-in motion sensor can also be programmed to illuminate the light and alert the user via push notification or trigger when movement is detected.

The Awair app provides deeper insight into user’s air quality. Data from all three environmental factors is aggregated into a color-coded and numeric Awair Score (from zero to 100), making it easy for users to interpret readings and take action. The Awair app also learns from the user’s habits and lifestyle preferences, tracking daily air quality data and providing recommendations based on what they’ve indicated is most important to them. These in-app insights coupled with Glow C’s ability to activate “non-smart” appliances makes maintaining optimal living conditions effortless.

USER EXPERIENCE

The AWAIR Glow C comes in a nicely branded box with an image of the product on the front. The interior box is thick and stores the plug well. As nice as the packaging is, I actually think that the product designer could have done something a little less hearty, still protect the product, and use less cardboard. The box does include some details of the Glow C and describes it as an Air Quality Monitor, Smart Plug, and Ambient Light.

Glow C is self-contained. Because it plugs directly into the wall it doesn’t require any cables for power and the light and air quality sensor are built-in, too. With that in mind, the only other thing that ships with Glow C is the Quick Start Guide. Inside the user is provided with some minimal details of the product along with a diagram of the different parts of the device. Setup does require the use of a mobile phone and either an Android or iOS app. The app is free and once you download it, it will walk you through the rest of the set-up.

One thing I want to point out here is that the AWAIR Glow C has limited smart home partners. Under the list of compatible apps & partners in the Quick Start Guide it lists — Nest, Google Assistant, Alexa, and IFTTT. It is not compatible (at this time) with HomeKit.

Because there are three main functions of the Glow C, I want to point out how each one has been tested since I got the device.

• Smart Plug: Most of the lights in our home are automated through smart light bulbs. Because of that, I had a hard time finding a non-smart device to plug into the outlet to test it out. In the past, I finally found a table lamp that wasn’t utilizing a smart bulb and I plugged it into the Glow. The app was able to turn the outlet on and off manually and I set up an automation. The AWAIR app allows users to automate a ‘trigger’ for the device plugged into it. You can tell it to turn on with Air Status, on a Schedule, or based off of Eco-Motion. Because this is a lamp, I decided to tell it to turn on/off when motion was detected. It worked quite well. This automation feature was new to me and I found it intriguing and useful.
• Ambient Light: With the light, you have three modes — Air Status, Ambient, and Off. The Air Status light tell you when the air quality is at a certain level. If it’s green, the air quality is good; orange = poor, and red = bad. The Ambient light option allows you to shift the color to any color you can choose within the app’s color wheel. You can also have the light triggered by motion.
• Air Quality Monitor: I was actually very impressed with the speed at which the Air Quality Monitor started taking readings. After I had the Glow C set-up, I got my first set of readings within a few moments. I love how the app displays the information and that it pairs data with colors so that you can visually tell what state your air is in without having to analyze a bunch of numbers. The app really does the work for you.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I found Glow C to be a very welcome addition to our home. We’ve had air quality monitors before and sometimes they aren’t very user-friendly. I love that there are so many different features to this smart device because it makes the investment (around $75/$89MSRP) worthwhile. I love the fact that you can pair this sensor with an air purifier or even connect it through IFTTT to your thermostat and circulate the air when it gets to thick with toxins. I find the Glow C to be a fun, easy to use, smart environmental device that is a great addition for any home.

For more information, visit getawair.com, Facebook, and Twitter.

Originally published at https://macsources.com on July 24, 2019.