A vast majority of us spend most of our time indoors. Yet we often have no idea about the quality of the air we are breathing while inside, and how it may affect our long and short-term health. This is why, in recent years, manufacturers such as Dyson, LG, and Samsung have begun to offer devices that inform users about the state of air pollution in their homes and what to do about it.

Now Sensibo, the Israeli company that was among the first in the world to make smart air conditioners, is joining this trend, and introducing a new device that can tell us more about the air we are breathing.

Is the air clean or not?

Sensibo's new device is called Sensibo Elements. This monitoring device may be placed in different rooms in your home, where it constantly monitors the air quality and various pollutants that are present or absent in your environment. On the device itself, there is a light behind the Sensibo symbol, which indicates via various colours the state of pollution in your home so you don’t even need to open the app.

If this sounds a little familiar to you, it may be because the company's previous flagship device - Sensibo Pure, is the air filter we reviewed last year. Unlike Sensibo Elements, which mainly gives you an indication of the condition of the air, but cannot necessarily affect its quality, Sensibo Pure can both monitor the air quality and improve it. Sensibo Elements is just a monitor, but unlike Sensibo Pure, it will not only tell you that the air is polluted with harmful micro-particles, but it also knows how to monitor other specific pollutants, such as CO2, VOCs, micropollutants (PM2.5) and ethanol. Within the app, one can see the levels of each of the different pollutants and receive instructions on how to find the source of the pollution and hopefully also get rid of it to enjoy cleaner air.

Sensibo as an ecosystem

Sensibo Elements supports the company's PureBoost feature, so if you have other Sensibo devices at home, it can tell them to start running. If Sensibo Elements detects that household pollution levels are rising, it can turn on your connected air conditioner (whether it's via Sensibo Sky or Air) and it will initiate a ventilation operation to bring cleaner air while increasing airflow. If you have the company's air purifier, Sensibo Pure, Sensibo Elements can instruct it to start operating. In short, Sensibo is building a product system that sort of works like an ecosystem, in unison, together; they don’t just want you to achieve your ideal home climate, but rather also want you to have cleaner air as well.

According to Ran Roth, CEO and co-founder of Sensibo: "There is no doubt that more than two years of COVID-19 has increased awareness of the issue of air quality at home and in the office. More people are currently looking for solutions that will allow them to control the air quality in their immediate environment. Sensibo Elements synchronizes with the rest of Sensibo's products, and in this way, we allow each person to make sure that they live in an environment free from impurities that are not visible to the human eye, but which dramatically affect health and quality of life."

We’ve already tried it

We received Sensibo Elements for a quick trial, and like any Sensibo product, the installation was simple– to the point that anyone could complete it in half a minute: connect the Sensibo Elements device to electricity (charger not included – thank you Apple and Samsung), scan the QR found in the Sensibo app, enter the password for the router and... that's it. From that moment on, a small graph was added below the row of the room with which I associated the device, and the air quality in the room is indicated (surprisingly, good). If you click on this graph you're taken to a dashboard that shows you the amounts of the specific pollutants.

Unfortunately, clicking on each of the components does not explain, for example, what they may be caused by, or tips on how to improve the air quality. I don't know if the reason for this lies in the fact that all the indicators in the rooms in my house today are positive, and perhaps if there is any harmful pollution, the app will alert me to it. But regardless, at least from my initial experience, such alerts don’t happen daily, which means that so far, I haven't learned anything new about my environment or how to improve it to enjoy fresher air. As the CEO of the company told me, knowing that there is no air pollution in your home in itself has added value - certainly when we are dealing with populations that are sensitive to pollution, like newborns.

Sensibo Elements is available for purchase on the company's website for 619 ILS (or 549 ILS during the Black Friday sale).