This is a We Own It review of Foobot!
What does Foobot do?!
Foobot is a home air quality monitor, it also connects to your smart home tech to control it, adjust your room and alert you of any problems.
It monitors in real time:
- Fine particles
- Volatile compounds
- Carbon Dioxide – eq
- Humidity
- Temperature
This then gives you an overall air quality score in the app as well as tips on how to improve each reading and the overall score.
Foobot itself is designed well and looks great, care has also been taken with the packaging – think Apple meets Innocent Smoothies, with text like:
“This Foobot likes you already” and “Don’t look at my bottom” printed on it.
Foobot Indoor Air Quality Monitor
How easy is it to setup?
Initial setup is quick and easy!
We set it up in our bedroom in under 5 minutes. This is done in a pretty unique way rotating the Foobot upside down until the Foobot changes colour.
You then follow the normal smart home tech process of connecting to its own ‘WiFi network’ and enter your WiFi password.
However after initial setup it does take 6 days to ‘settle’ into your room and start giving you notifications about the air quality.
Foobot is controlled by the app, it also has an Apple watch app – a nice touch and often missing from smart home tech.
What’s the connectivity?
Foobot works with an impressive range of smart home tech!
- Nest – an official ‘works with nest’ integration
- Amazon Echo
- LuxGeo
- Ecobe
This adds extra features like being able to ask Alexa what the room quality is like in a room. This is good for quickly checking before bed how the room is.
It also works with IFTTT allowing you to create rules and alerts.
For example we set up an IFTTT rule to change our room light red if the Carbon Dioxide levels were not in a good range.
How much does Foobot cost?
£254 from Amazon, although at the time of writing it’s on special at £179!
What’s it like living with it?
Interesting – things we never thought about like how does spraying deodorant and hair spray impact air quality. The answer is it changes it a lot, something you can rectify by opening a window or turning on a fan.
We are also getting into a habit of checking air quality before sleep and making adjustments to ensure its good quality before bedtime. It could easily be psychosomatic but it does seem to be having a positive impact! We will update after 4 weeks of use.
The only annoying issue is on our iPhone X the week view in the app cannot easily be pressed as the buttons are now where you tap to go home, due to the new iPhone X UI design.
What are our final thoughts?
After only using it for a few weeks this is a very handy bit of smart home tech. Making us think about what we breathe in and what the air quality is actually like in the room we sleep in. Foobot marketing makes a very good point “you spend 9% of your time indoors” yet have never thought about what the air INSIDE is like.
Having it connected to Hue via IFTTT and giving us visual clues is very interesting, as is being able to quickly ask Alexa. If we had a baby this would be an addition to the baby’s room without question.
This is a great addition to any smart home,