The battle begins, I am going to dive right into the comparison. In this comparison I am only going to compare the PM2.5 sensors because a good PM2.5 sensors says a lot about the quality of the device. The participants are:

• Awair 2nd Edition
• AirVisual Node
• uRad A3

Over the course of 3 days I had the devices set one next to the other. The new Awair took over 26,500 measurements which was a huge amount of data to handle so I had to reduce them down to about 8,500 measurements. The AirVisual took 281 measurements (I had set it to take measurements every 10 minutes) and the uRad A3 took approximately 3,900 measurements.

We can see from the graph that more or less all devices follow the same trend. The uRad has a tendency to register lower values when the PM2.5 concentrations are low and higher values when the concentrations are high, in comparison always with the other two. The new Awair follows with on small offset the uRad’s path and AirVisual is in-between the two of them.

Overall, I am happy with the results from all three devices, two of them are indoor air quality monitors and the measurements represent a reliable estimation of the Particulate Matter inside a room.

Keep in mind that we will never have a perfect alignment between different sensors, even if they were made from the same manufacturer, low-cost or pro-grade.