I just got an Airthings Radon monitor, and the integration with HA went smoothly. As a starting dashboard I have a simple card displaying sensor values.
But I let myself get carried away and got the one with the most sensors. So expected to see history graphs so I can look at trends or events, but it never occurred to me they were all different units and scales. HA wants to create many charts, which is less easy to read.
Does anyone have dashboard ideas on how to display these?
Do you find it to be reliable/accurate? I was going to order one of these until I read some reviews.
Temperature and humidity is all I have other data sources to verify and even then it’s only temperature
- sensor is currently in my family room addition and it closely tracks the Remotec rm-22 ir blaster temperature there, so excellent. But a secondary goal is to decide whether it’s really worth it turning down the heat at night. You can see the family room heat pump takes most of the day to bring the temperature back up. I don’t think it’s a problem but heat pump sees the air temp is about right so doesn’t add much heat, while the thermal mass of the slab takes hours to come up to temperature
- humidity is fascinating how different from the rest of the house but believable: family room is running a heat pump so would dry, main house is a gas furnace burning inside air, so pulling in high humidity outside air. So mid-afternoon, for example, when both are heating you can see the heat pump dries type air while furnace raises humidity, while overnight the humidity evens out as both are off and the air circulates. This morning is explained by the heat pump being off: I was wonder why it’s a bit chilly. The temperature rising in the morning is misleading because there is some air circulation from the rest of the house
I only have an hour of data so far
Edit: after a day’s data, now’s the hard part: deciding what to do about it and how much to trust the accuracy. I have not put the detector in the basement yet(primary goal is monitoring radon), but it’s in a family room addition on a slab, with old direct vented gas heaters (actually those are off right now, so it’s not ytesting those)
- VOC typical level is generally fine but there was a spike at 8pm well above the recommended limit. Is it a glitch/noise? Is it something I need to act on? Is it accurate? I don’t remember any event that could have caused it, so I guess for now see if it repeats
- pm10 and pm2.5 are generally fine but there was a spike just after midnight. Still within recommended levels so I’m not worried yet but will pay attention
- radon is still climbing. Still fine and they say it needs up to 30 days, but I’d expect the basement to be higher so I need this to level off soon. If it doesn’t, my likely action is to do a charcoal test and see how the numbers match up
Clearly I also need a chart that can display a limit, or two. For example, who recommends a limit of 100 for radon and epa recommends a limit of 148, so I’d like to see them both on the radon graph, and maybe a color change or something if a point in time exceeds them
I’m not sure if they’re accurate (never got mine third party tested) but they’re consistent. Stick two next to each other and get the same results.
I’ve found apexcharts-card to be fairly configurable and good looking. I’ve put 2 different data types on the one graph and used two axes (price left, % right). Sometimes the values get “stuck”, but a refresh fixes it.
YAML code for my chart
type: custom:apexcharts-card apex_config: legend: show: false graph_span: 12h span: start: minute yaxis: - id: price min: ~-10 max: ~40 decimals: 0 - id: renewables opposite: true min: 0 max: ~100 decimals: 0 header: show: true title: Amber Prices show_states: true colorize_states: true series: - entity: sensor.amber_general_forecast name: General Forecast unit: c/kWh color: "#3498DB" yaxis_id: price data_generator: > const data = []; data.push([hass.states['sensor.amber_general_price'].attributes.nem_date.replace(/0{2}$/, "30"), hass.states['sensor.amber_general_price'].attributes.per_kwh*100]); for(let i = 0; i <= 24; i++) { data.push([entity.attributes.forecasts[i].nem_date.replace(/0{2}$/, "30"), entity.attributes.forecasts[i].per_kwh*100]) } return data.reverse(); - entity: sensor.amber_feed_in_forecast name: Feed In Forecast unit: c/kWh color: "#ff9800" yaxis_id: price data_generator: > const data = []; data.push([hass.states['sensor.amber_feed_in_price'].attributes.nem_date.replace(/0{2}$/, "30"), hass.states['sensor.amber_feed_in_price'].attributes.per_kwh*100]); for(let i = 0; i <= 24; i++) { data.push([entity.attributes.forecasts[i].nem_date.replace(/0{2}$/, "30"), entity.attributes.forecasts[i].per_kwh*100]) } return data.reverse(); - entity: sensor.amber_feed_in_forecast name: Renewables yaxis_id: renewables unit: "%" color: "#2ECC71" data_generator: > const data = [];Thanks but this needs like half a dozen, so I don’t think this type of chart will scale
I don’t even have the right terminology so google and ChatGPT were not helpful …… does ha have some sort of trend graph that is a combination of different sets of values, over the same time axis?
A goal might be to identify events and their effects. For example perhaps turning on the dryer raises particulates and CO2: I know when I turn on the dryer so want to look at the graph for any matching changes in any measurement .
(Or maybe I’m fooling myself: I have no idea what the sampling frequency is yet)