Most people don’t think about air quality until it becomes a problem. It might not be random if you’ve ever felt sluggish in a home office or noticed your allergies acting up indoors. CO2 levels, humidity, and temperature all affect how comfortable and healthy your home actually is. A car fire at my neighbor’s house a few months ago reaffirmed this for me. The SwitchBot Meter Pro CO2 Monitor is built to make tracking air quality easier and integrates with HomeKit over Matter.
HomeKit Weekly is a series focused on smart home accessories, automation tips and tricks, and everything to do with Apple’s smart home framework.
What can it do?
At its core, the SwitchBot Meter Pro CO2 Monitor is a 5-in-1 sensor that measures:
- CO2 levels
- Temperature
- Humidity
- Time and date
- Comfort level based on the air quality
It features a large, easy-to-read display, and the built-in battery lasts up to a year. More importantly, it can send alerts when CO2 levels get too high, telling you when to crack a window or turn on an air purifier. Of course, you can automate the latter over HomeKit.
What’s needed for HomeKit support?
Here’s the catch before you purchase: this isn’t a native HomeKit device. It works with the SwitchBot app, but to get it into HomeKit, you have to enable Matter support through a SwitchBot Hub 2, which acts as a bridge. The Hub 2 supports Matter, and that’s your way into HomeKit. Once set up, HomeKit will recognize the SwitchBot Meter Pro as a temperature and humidity sensor (though not as a CO2 monitor). That limitation aside, it still opens the door for useful automation opportunities within HomeKit.
What can it do within HomeKit?
Bridging this device over Matter/the Switchbot Hub into HomeKit adds some nice automation options:
- Trigger a smart plug to turn on an air purifier if humidity rises.
- Turn on a HomeKit-enabled air purifier based on readings
- Adjust a HomeKit-enabled thermostat based on temperature readings.
- Get Siri updates by asking for the current temperature or humidity in a room.
- Use automations to flash a HomeKit-compatible light red when air quality worsens.
The most significant missing option for it is that CO2 readings don’t show up in HomeKit. If you want CO2 alerts, you must use the SwitchBot app alongside HomeKit. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than nothing. The Switchbot app is pretty useful overall.
Wrap up
Overall, it’s a really useful and good looking product. If you’re looking for a fully HomeKit-native CO2 monitor, this isn’t it. But if you’re okay using SwitchBot’s Hub 2 as a bridge, the SwitchBot Meter Pro CO2 Monitor can still be a useful addition to your HomeKit environment. It won’t unlock every feature inside HomeKit, but with temperature and humidity automations, it can still unlock some pretty nice use cases.
You can buy the SwitchBot Meter Pro CO2 Monitor from Amazon or directly from Switchbot.
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