Hello i am teacher and i am doing an home assistant project in my schools with by installing efferent environmental sensors .
What are the best air quality sensors ( i don’t really care about accuracy becouse its s school project
Also my idea was to install for outdoor sensors a zeebee cordinator and for indoors wifi sesnors since school has wifi in most areas .
Hi, welcome. What do you mean by best, if accurate is not what you value? Cheap? Interesting for outside? Air quality sensors are often not cheap. The cheap ones often infer (basically: guess) values from one sensor they do have, such as VOC.
Do you know you might not even need sensors yourself for outside, if it is ok that the measurement is some km from the school? There are Home Assistant Integrations that get data from local laboratories that measure it too. It depends on where you live which service might be best and if they have a station close by. For instance:
Sensor wise: If you can afford it and many sensors are a pre, and you want to teach kids also a thing or two about technology, for inside the Apollo AIR-1 is a good and fun one. That is because it is based on ESP, open source, (you could build something similar yourself). The firmware is based on ESPHome, so if you can look at the yaml file they use to build the firmware too. And depending on how many sensors you want, you can limit the price somewhat.
While not cheap, for a school I would add in the CO2 sensor though: that has its use for ventilation purposes too: and will show the effect of a full closed classroom vs a ventilated one really clearly. Every school should have those, because if it is too high kids cannot study and have headaches to boot.