Your surrounding air quality is more important than you think. While some might take it for granted, it is one of the things that greatly affects your health and wellbeing. It is also something you can hardly control when you are out and about. At home though, you have a lot more control over your environment. There is still a problem; how do you know if you are breathing clean, pollutant free air at home? You need an air quality sensor for that.
Where do you get one? Why not from your favourite Swede furniture store, IKEA? They have just announced the VINDSTYRKA air quality sensor that features a large display to tell you if your air at home is of poor quality.
Like any IKEA product, it is built to be a real plug-and-play solution for any homes. Its simplistic design is also made to ensure that it looks at home in any environment, no matter where you place it in your home. Their marketing image shows it sitting in what looks like an island kitchen counter, and even that looks great and natural.
It measures particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5) particles in the air within its environment. It also takes humidity, temperature and TVOC levels. The measurements taken by the air quality sensor are general readings you can find on most higher-end air purifiers you can buy in the market today. IKEA is not about producing ultra-premium products at unreachable prices though. They are about modularity and accessible home improvement products. This VINDSTYRKA is exactly made with that in mind.
The IKEA VINDSTYRKA can be connected to DIRIGERA, IKEA’s hub for all things smart home. That way, it sends all the information collected on the sensor to the IKEA Home smartphone app. The readings can be used by the app to trigger other smart home products that is compatible with DIRIGERA. You can pair it with IKEA’s own STARKVIND air purifiers, for example, and trigger them when your air quality drops to a certain level.
It is not just IKEA’s smart home products that the IKEA VINDSTYRKA works with though. DIRIGERA hub is also Matter-enabled. That means that you can get the air quality sensor to work with any other smart home tools or appliances that works with Matter. You might have a separate smart air purifier that is controlled by a different smart home app. As long as it works with Matter, your air quality sensor still can trigger the air purifier. You can also check your air quality readings on non-Android devices in this case.
The IKEA VINDSTYRKA smart air quality sensor is said to be available in all IKEA stores April 2023 onward. That is usually not the case for Malaysia though. Like the SONOS speakers from IKEA, it might take another month or so before you see the VINDSTYRKA on the shelves in IKEA stores across the nation. There are no mentions on pricing either currently. If you are interested in the product, you might want to check IKEA stores by May 2023, or just hang around and we will let you know as soon as we get more information. You also want to keep in mind that the DIRIGERA hub is not yet available in Malaysia. More on the IKEA VINDSTYRKA and smart home products can be found on their website.