How to Choose a Wireless, Battery-Powered Air Quality Monitor

If you’re starting an indoor air quality (IAQ) monitoring project, there are several decisions you have to make upfront before jumping into your project: which type of monitor to use, what features to look for, and whether you should use a wired or wireless solution. 

If you determine that a wireless solution (for both power and connectivity) is best for your project, the next step is deciding which wireless, battery-powered monitor to use — and that’s what we’ll be talking about today.

What Is a Wireless, Battery-Powered Air Quality Monitor?

A wireless, battery-powered monitor does not require a physical, hard-wired connection for any aspect of its operations. These monitors use batteries as a power source, instead of electrical or Ethernet cables required for wired solutions. For connectivity, these monitors offer a wide range of wireless communication protocols, from Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to LoRaWAN and cellular. 

An air quality monitor with a wireless connection and battery-powered operation is ideal for projects that involve retrofitting an existing building — all you have to do is attach the monitor to the wall and connect it to the network, meaning no operational disruptions or high installation costs from running new cables — or projects that need a high level of flexibility to adapt monitor placement as needed.

A wireless solution can make a huge difference in your ease of installation and set-up, but not all monitors are created equal — not all will deliver the convenience and flexibility that you’re looking for. 

To help you choose the right wireless, battery-powered monitor for your project, we’ve compiled the top five factors you should consider before making your decision.

Five Factors to Consider for Wireless, Battery-Powered Monitors

1. Battery life

   One of the benefits of a wireless monitor is that it doesn’t need to be hardwired to the building to have power. However, using batteries can be a double-edged sword — if you choose a monitor with a short battery life, you will need to conduct frequent battery replacements down the road, which creates a lot of work for your facilities team and site managers.

   Aim to find a monitor with a battery life that lasts several years to minimize the time (and costs) you spend replacing batteries. For example, the Kaiterra Sensedge Go has a battery life that lasts up to 8 years, powered by our patent-pending Adaptive Sampling™ technology, which is a huge time- and cost-saver for IAQ projects, not to mention the lower environmental impact that comes from reducing battery waste.

   Another “hidden” pain point about battery replacements that a lot of people don’t realize is the timing of replacing batteries. Ideally, every monitor will run out of battery at the same time, so you only have to spend one day changing batteries in all the monitors in your building. But, this is not the case with most battery-powered monitors. 

   You may find yourself changing batteries in one monitor per week or month, meaning you’ll be doing battery replacements year-round. This is another point Kaiterra’s Adaptive Sampling™ can address — the smart algorithm helps sync the battery replacement schedules between all the Sensedge Go devices in your portfolio, to make your maintenance as easy as possible.

2. Sampling frequency

   Sampling frequency is another factor to watch out for in air quality monitors — it can be especially problematic for battery-powered devices. This is because choosing a monitor with a long battery life often comes at the expense of sampling frequency, as taking frequent air samples consumes more power (especially for power-hungry functions like measuring particulate matter). Vendors may promise an extended battery life but compromise on sampling frequency, which has a number of drawbacks.

   The main drawback is that you won’t be getting continuous data anymore. In order for your monitor to provide a complete picture of your air quality, it has to sample your air frequently enough to capture rapid changes in air quality levels. If your monitor only samples air once or twice an hour, you won’t get a truly representative view of your indoor environment. 

   This defeats the purpose of installing continuous monitors — instead of getting continuous data to track changes in real-time, you’ll essentially get spot-checks of your air quality and miss out on events or trends in your environment, such as occupancy fluctuations, HVAC operations, outdoor pollutants, etc.

   Before you choose a monitor for your project, be sure to check both battery life and sampling frequency to make sure your monitor can meet your project goals.

3. Gateway range and costs

   While buyers spend a lot of time analyzing and comparing the technical specifications of the air quality monitor itself, very little attention is given to the gateway — if the air quality monitor you’re considering uses one for communication. However, this is an extremely important factor that can eat up your budget. 

   The price of a gateway is often just as expensive, if not more so, than the air quality monitor itself. If you don’t carefully evaluate the gateway, you may end up purchasing several of them for your project.

   When evaluating a gateway, there are a few factors to consider to prevent gateway costs from consuming a significant part of your budget: the range of the gateway (how far it can reach and how many floors it can penetrate) and its capacity (how many devices one gateway can support).

   Consider this comparison:Imagine you have a project requiring 100 monitors across 8 floors. Both Company A and Company B offer similar air quality monitors that meet your needs, but Company A’s gateway can only cover one floor and host 10 devices each, while Company B’s gateway covers 5 floors and can host 50 devices each. This means you would need 16 gateways from Company A but only 2 from Company B — a huge difference!

   Choosing a solution with an ultra-long-range gateway that can host multiple devices means you’ll need fewer gateways to buy and configure, leading to cost savings and significantly less set-up work.

4. Building automation capabilities

   Does your project need building automation? If so, you have to choose a monitoring solution that supports this integration, such as BACnet/IP. This allows you to seamlessly integrate your monitors into your building management system (BMS), adding an additional layer of data to help the BMS improve building performance by optimizing:
   
   • Ventilation, filtration, etc. based on occupancy and air quality data
   • HVAC operations based on the level of outdoor pollution each day
   • Occupant health, comfort, and productivity by ensuring optimal air quality
   
   Many wireless monitoring options out there are not built to integrate with BMS, or if they do, their technology isn’t fully optimized to work within a BMS, which can make it incredibly difficult to achieve the seamless automations you’re looking for — so be sure to ask your air quality monitoring vendors about BMS capabilities before making your decision.
   
   Even if BMS integration isn’t critical to your current project goals, the industry standard is rapidly moving in this direction. While BMS integration is a nice-to-have feature today, it will soon become a must-have for any IAQ monitoring project in the future.

5. Maintenance and long-term value

   Every air quality monitor has to be calibrated regularly to maintain full accuracy. Over time, dirt and dust will accumulate and can make a measurable impact on sensor performance. Regular calibrations are crucial to restoring accuracy and helping you get the most value out of your monitoring investment — it’s also a requirement for building certifications like WELL and LEED.

   The challenge with calibration is that it can be incredibly tedious. This process typically involves sending the sensor back to the manufacturer for external calibration or having a technician come to your building and manually calibrate every monitor with a handheld device for reference — neither of which is efficient or cost-effective.

   Choosing a wireless air quality monitor that also offers an easy way to do calibrations can save you a substantial amount of time and money. For example, all Kaiterra monitors have a modular, swappable sensor design, so calibration becomes as simple as taking out the old sensor and putting in a new one.

   This modular design not only offers a simple, cost-effective way to calibrate your sensors, but it also allows you to upgrade your sensors each year if needed — without installing all new monitors. That means you can add new parameters as soon as they’re available, which is an easy way to future-proof your monitoring project and stay compliant with new building certification standards, legislative requirements, or any other business goals.

Find the Right Wireless Air Quality Monitor for Your Project

While these five factors are the most important to consider when choosing a wireless air quality monitor, there are a variety of other factors to evaluate to decide which monitor is best for your project. If you want to speak to an expert about choosing the right wireless monitor, connect with a member of our team today!