Looking for a supported air purifier

I wonder if anyone has up to date information on a recent air purifier model that works well with openHAB? (I am looking for something with sensors, particle filter and carbon filter or equivalent, and quiet).

Is the Xiaomi / SmartMi stuff generally supported? I’ve tried to install the Mi Wifi binding, but there aren’t a lot of thing types available.

I spent too much time looking for a perfect air purifier, and settled on the Philips AC1715/11. Now I just got it, and it isn’t able to communicate over HTTP or CoAP at all, and I find all these reports on Home Assistant forum about it being unstable. What a waste of time…

I’ve no direct experience with them, but I know air filters that support VeSync (e.g. Core200S/Core300S or Core400S) will work with the binding: VeSync - Bindings | openHAB

I don’t know anything about these air filters but I can say their humidifiers work well with the binding.

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IKEA’s air purifiers are supported through Zigbee2mqtt and the beta DIRIGERA binding. I’d guess that they also work with the Zigbee binding.

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Wow thanks for the great tips! Core200S and IKEA STARKVIND both seem like great options for me, just as good as the Philips one. (I have a Zigbee dongle in a drawer, but haven`t had a need to configure it yet)

I’ve sent an email to Philips and will give them a bit to reply, but I’ll be shocked and super impressed if they can help with this. Will post the results here, which could take several weeks, but I’m quite optimistic now.

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You also have this option :smiley:

Vesync app and a Levoit air purifier are one possibilities like Ric said. Used that one for a long time.
Ikea Starkvind is likely the best one that links directly to openhab. Check zigbee2mqtt to understand the information it provides.
Don’t forget the XIaomi ones with the MI binding too. They are quite good, but having DRM on the filters irks me.
Or get a dumdumb air purifier like the rectangle one from IKEA and use a smart socket to turn it on and off.
For sensors you can use ad hoc ones, placed somewhere else. Ikea has a zigbee one.

Some of options abound :slight_smile:

Hehe that Levoit hack is pretty cool.
Philips replied, but they say that it only works with Alexa and those kinds of things, of course. Nice that they read the question and replied, but I’m returning that one.

I ended up going with the IKEA one for various unrelated reasons (I thought the airflow would be directional, like a fan, and I prefer for it to communicate locally). It’s mostly working, but I’ll describe what I had to do anyway.

I have a Sonoff Zigbee dongle based on the Ember chipset. The openHAB binding worked right away, and I could connect the IKEA Starkvind unit. It only had one channel though, for the fan speed. That wasn’t sufficient for me, so I wanted to try Zigbee2mqtt (Z2M). I’m a fan of MQTT and I have an infrastructure to run docker containers, so it’s a pretty good fit.

Z2M refused to talk to my dongle because the firmware was too old. I had to perform an intricate and scary update procedure,including removing the dongle’s case to get to the buttons, but to my surprise it didn’t brick the dongle and it worked.

Now Z2M worked, and I figured I’d try the HomeAssistant component, instead of adding all the channels/topics manually. This worked well, and openHAB discovered the bridge and the air purifier, with a great selection of channels

The first two channels don’t really work though, but I can set it to auto mode using “Preset Mode” and turn it off using “Speed”. Seems that Z2M uses a json-based message format instead of just sending the commands / values. So I can’t work around this issue by creating a plain normal MQTT channel (and ignore the HomeAssistant stuff) At the moment I don’t really need to control the fan speed directly, so this is fine.

Thanks all for the discussion and insight, now I will create a couple of rules and call it a day.

Edit: Oh, and the IKEA seems like a quite good unit, in terms of quality, range of speeds, etc. I don’t know how well it actually works, but so far, I like it.

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Yep. Sounds about right. You went through many of my mental steps I went through while doing my own research :smiley:
I’m now at the stage of making my own freaking purifier xD

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