Originally published at: IKEA Vindstyrka Indoor Air Quality Monitor Review
Over the past few years, we’ve seen inexpensive air quality monitors not only become available but also widely accessible. While this is primarily driven by increasing awareness around indoor air quality and its dangers, it’s also partly due to many large brands getting on board and manufacturing their own air quality products. One of these brands is IKEA. Over the past couple of years, it has created two inexpensive air quality monitors, which are now on sale in all of its stores worldwide. Not only is it great to see new air quality monitor options, but it’s fantastic to see…
How does the loudness of this IKEA Vindstyrka monitor compare to others? Is it just this model that’s unusually loud? I couldn’t sleep with it in the bedroom.
Hi @karol,
Thanks a lot for joining! This is a good question.
When I tested the IKEA monitors, I placed them in the living room, and I didn’t notice any significant noises, so I overlooked this aspect in my review. That said, I have heard other noise complaints about this monitor, and I think it might be time for me to give it a second look because it seems like a serious issue.
The noises generally come from the PM sensor, as these require a fan to pass fresh air through the sensor for consistent measurement. Therefore, no monitor without a PM sensor should make noise (in theory). For example, CO2 monitors shouldn’t make any noise.
However, even amongst other sensors that measure PM, the IKEA monitor does seem to be very loud. I currently have an AirGradient ONE and a Qingping Air Monitor Gen 2 in my room (within one metre of my bed), and I don’t notice either. That said, if I listen closely with no background noise, the Qingping emits a faint hum. On the other hand, I can barely hear the AirGradient monitor.
Based on my experience with air quality monitors, I would say that, unfortunately, the IKEA monitor is probably quite loud. I also found the same with the Amazon Smart AQ monitor, which uses almost the same sensor.
Now that you’ve brought this issue to my attention, I plan to add noise comparisons to my future reviews.
Ethan Thank you very much for your work!
You’re welcome! I’m glad it’s proven useful.
I’ve gone ahead and ordered a decibel metre, so in future reviews I can mention sound too. Thank you for the idea!
Apologies for reviving this topic, but I would like to keep everything in one place if possible!
I’ve recently been further testing two Vindstyrka monitors against a reference device and, to do this, I needed to connect them. In doing so, I realized that I made a couple of mistakes in my initial review that I will update when I have time. For now, I wanted to make a quick update here.
If you have a Zigbee adapter for Home Assistant, or another platform like Homey (with the IKEA Trådfri app) you can connect your IKEA Vindstyrkas with relative ease. I’ve had these two devices connected to Homey for the past few days, and I’ve found this to be a far more powerful combination as I’m finally able to access historical data from the two.
If you’re already in one of these ecosystems (or something else that supports these monitors) they are suddenly a far more interesting device - especially considering the very low price.
AQ-SPEC just published their field testing report for pm2.5 for the IKEA Vindstyrka sensor:
Bottom of page https://www.aqmd.gov/aq-spec
Or direct PDF link here https://www.aqmd.gov/docs/default-source/aq-spec/field-evaluations/ikea-vindstyrka---field-evaluation.pdf?sfvrsn=ce156b7e_2
Interesting, it’s great to see the device get tested. Thank you for sharing @wmui!
I got almost exactly the same results in my own tests against a reference (Palas Fidas). It looks to underreport usually, but it does show the trends well. For such a low cost monitor, I think this is quite a good result. I imagine with some kind of calibration, it could be even better.