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Video: Reading your sensor data

A guided tour of the AirSuite Monitor Portal — the Overview page, All Sensors, and one sensor in detail — with a written transcript.

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Your AirSuite indoor environment monitors record a lot of data. This walkthrough shows you how to see it, and how to make sense of it, across the three pages that answer the three questions people actually ask: is anything wrong right now, which spaces need attention, and what happened in this room? You won’t need any technical background to follow along.

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Getting your bearings

After you sign in, everything starts from the menu on the left. Overview is the front page. Alerts lists anything currently outside your thresholds. All Sensors is the full list of your monitors. Properties — or Schools, if you’re an education customer — groups those sensors by site. And My Account is where you set your language, your temperature units, and which notifications you’d like to receive.

If you’d rather have the screen space, the chevron at the bottom of the menu collapses it down to icons, and brings it back again.

The Overview page

Active alerts

To start with, there’s a map of your sensors, and beside it, Active alerts. An alert appears here when a reading crosses one of your thresholds and stays there. The icon tells you which measurement, and the time on the right is how long it’s been going on. Hover over a row for a plain description, and click the name to go straight to that sensor.

The quick figures

Some of these quick stats are more useful than others when you’re looking after a single site.

Daily peak active devices is the number of sensors that reported on each of the past thirty days, with the trend drawn behind it. If you have twenty sensors installed, you want this line to sit flat at twenty. A step down means something stopped reporting on that day.

Beside it, the Active sensors count. If a red inactive figure appears next to the green one, some of your monitors haven’t reported recently, and that almost always needs someone to do something — a sensor switched off, moved out of range, or a battery due for replacement. Click the red figure, and the Portal walks you through the usual causes.

Two more things are worth looking at. Active alerts counts how many alerts were raised across the past thirty days — in plain terms, that’s how many times things have gone wrong. Avg alert duration is how long the average one lasted, which is how quickly each problem was resolved.

The place to dig is the Active alerts panel we just looked at. It shows which alerts are open right now, and the time beside each one is how long it has been open. If you see the same space sitting there day after day, you’ve found where that average is coming from.

Choosing a date range

Everything below this point is based on the date picker in the corner of the screen. By default, it looks at the past week, but you can change it to another preset like the past day or past month, or any other date range.

Highlights

Which brings us to the part most people find useful first: Highlights — called Room highlights if you’re a school. These cards pull out the spaces worth looking at, in order of importance.

This section highlights the good and the bad — things like which rooms are most used and least frequently used across the selected time period. In the example, the School Hall is being used less than any other room, which isn’t surprising, and probably not something to be concerned about. But if that was another classroom, you might question why one of the classrooms was being used so much more than the other one.

Averages

Below that is the Averages section, split up into three views. The Environment view shows you the average measurements recorded by all your sensors across the selected time period — good for seeing at a glance whether you’re typically falling into the comfortable ranges.

Insights gives derived measurements like ventilation, airtightness, and hours spent above a temperature. You can read into all of these yourself, but it’s worth keeping an eye on the Total Hours Above 25°C measurement — in summer, that obviously tells you when it’s too hot, which we don’t want; and in winter, it can tell you whether you’re wasting energy by heating the rooms up hotter than they need to be.

Finally, the Scores tell you your rating out of a hundred across the board. A score is simply the percentage of occupied time that a measurement stayed inside its acceptable range. So a temperature score of 82 out of 100 means the building was kept at a comfortable temperature for 82 per cent of the time people were there.

The summary report

Scroll on, and the page turns into a full report — the same content as the report we email you, but live, and for whatever period you choose.

It opens with three figures: how many occupied hours were monitored and across how many spaces; the share of that time with CO₂ below your upper limit; and the share inside your target temperature range. Under the last two you’ll see the change since the previous period, so you can tell whether things are heading the right way.

What CO₂, temperature and humidity actually tell you

Before we read those tables, it’s worth being clear about what the three measurements actually tell you.

Carbon dioxide — or CO₂ — is what we breathe out, so the more people you have in a room, the higher you’ll see the CO₂ level climbing. CO₂ isn’t all that harmful in itself, although if it gets really high you’ll probably be getting drowsy and finding it harder to concentrate. But mainly, we use CO₂ as a way of telling us how good the ventilation is in the space. When CO₂ is high, that means there’s not a lot of fresh air coming in, so the people in the room will be re-breathing the same air over and over — and that means those people will be at more risk of sharing germs with each other, particularly airborne viruses like COVID-19.

Temperature is a nice obvious one — that’s just how warm or how cold it is, and the World Health Organisation recommends a comfortable range of 18 to 25 degrees. Below about 16 degrees, people are at increased risk of developing respiratory issues — particularly young children and the elderly — and above 25 degrees it’s going to be very unpleasant, and if you’re a student, you’re probably not going to be able to focus in the classroom.

Humidity is how much moisture is in the air. In New Zealand, high humidity is generally what we want to watch out for. It’s the earliest warning you get of mould, before anything is visible or smells musty. Lots of moisture in the air also makes it harder to heat — depending on how humid it is outside, it can be more efficient to open the windows to let some fresh air in first, and then heat it afterwards.

Reading the score tables

Each of the three gets its own section, and they all work the same way. On the left, a table: one row per space, one column per band, showing the percentage of occupied time spent in each. The colours match the chart beside it.

Rows are ordered worst first, and there’s an average row for the site as a whole — anything above that line performed worse than your average, and it’s marked for you.

On the right are the readings those percentages came from, plotted for every space. The worst performers are already selected when the page loads. Click a name in the legend to add or remove a line, and hover one to highlight the same space in the other charts. The coloured dot beside each name in the table matches its line, so you can move between the two without guessing.

Particulates and VOCs

If your sensors measure particulates and volatile organic compounds, two more tables follow: the highest daily average PM2.5 in each space — the World Health Organisation suggests a daily average shouldn’t go above fifteen micrograms per cubic metre more than three days a year — and average VOC levels during occupied hours.

Device status

Last is Device status, in three columns: spaces that were probably unused, sensors running low on battery, and sensors that are offline, with how long they’ve been that way.

If you have sensors appearing in the first column, that’s nothing to worry about — it just means no occupied time was detected in those rooms, and they won’t appear in the tables and charts above.

A sensor in the low battery column still has some life left, but not much. Who to ask depends on how your sensors were supplied: if you’re a school supported by the Ministry of Education, your Ministry representative can arrange a battery replacement — otherwise it’s whoever looks after your AirSuite account. And in the meantime, plugging the sensor into a USB power supply will keep it running.

A sensor in the offline column has already stopped. Usually that means the battery has run out, but it may also have been switched off, or moved somewhere it can’t get a signal. If you can, go and find it — that will normally tell you straight away what it needs. And the same people can arrange a replacement device, or a power adapter to get it going again.

All Sensors

Groups and search

Overview tells you where to look. All Sensors is where you compare.

The page opens with your sensors grouped by state — active first, then sleeping, then inactive, then any you previously owned, then any not yet deployed. The number beside each heading is how many are in it, and clicking the heading collapses it.

Sleeping is worth a word. Some sensors drop into a power-saving mode overnight, to make the batteries last longer, and while they’re in it they sit in this group rather than under Active. So if you look at this page in the evening or at the weekend and find sensors in Sleeping, that’s completely normal — that’s them doing their job.

The search box at the top filters by name or serial number as you type, and Control-F puts your cursor straight into it.

Choosing what the table shows

By default the table shows each sensor’s name, location, type, and when it was last active. The interesting part is behind the Display button on the active heading.

Data type gives you a few choices. Sensor readings shows the latest value for every measurement — that’s your right-now view. Scores rates the past month out of a hundred — that’s your comparison view. Insights shows the derived measures: mould index, ventilation, airtightness. And Diagnostics covers the health of the sensors themselves — signal strength and battery.

Looking at the latest readings is the easiest to get your head around, but it’s only a point in time — whereas by looking at the Scores, you can get a sense for how your rooms are performing across time. In the example, most of the rooms have excellent ventilation, but a few of them are outside the acceptable range for 25% of the time. Those are the rooms worth digging into further, to see if they could be improved.

Click any column heading to sort by it, and the spaces that need work come straight to the top.

Filtering, comparing and exporting

The panel on the left narrows the list. Filter by location, by device type or connection, by whether a sensor is plugged in or running on battery, or by a value range — show me everything with a CO₂ score below 85, for instance.

The checkbox at the start of each row selects a sensor for comparison. Tick a few, then use the link at the bottom of the page to plot them together on one set of charts — the same charts you’ll see on the individual sensor page, with every space you selected drawn on them.

And the export button beside the search box saves the table exactly as you’re looking at it, filters and all, as a spreadsheet file.

One sensor, close up

Latest measurements and device details

Clicking a sensor name anywhere in the Portal brings you here.

Once again, we have the latest measurements and scores — this time for just this one space. Each tile is coloured against your thresholds, so a red tile means that reading is outside the range you’ve set.

Underneath, Device details is about the sensor rather than the room: whether it’s plugged in or running on battery, whether it has a good signal, how the battery is holding up, and when it last reported in. Hover any of these for an explanation — and for some of them, a suggestion of what to do about it.

Time of day, events and location

The circular chart compares the space by time of day — switch between day, night, and a full twenty-four hours. Occupied time only is worth knowing about: it leaves out the periods when nobody was there, so an empty room overnight doesn’t drag your figures around.

Beside it, Events records anything that changed the context — the sensor was renamed, it was moved, or you added a note of your own. If a reading shifts and you can’t see why, look here first. And the location card shows where the sensor is, with a Move option if that’s wrong. You can see your other nearby sensors shown on the map as yellow dots, and you can usually see the approximate location of the cell tower your sensor is connected to.

Historic charts

The rest of the page is history. The charts are grouped into categories — Environment for the everyday measurements, then Performance Insights, Particulate Matter, Diagnostics for battery and signal, All Charts for everything at once, and Table if you’d rather read the numbers.

Set the period at the top, or just drag across any chart to zoom into a moment. Every chart moves together, and the resolution shown beside the range tells you how much each point is averaged over.

From the Compare menu you can show the weather on these charts, or add other sensors. Filter marks events on the timeline. Display controls what’s drawn — box plots for longer ranges, the colour scheme, and the order the charts appear in. Any chart can be saved as an image, and Export gives you the underlying data as a spreadsheet, either raw or averaged by five minutes, by the hour, or by the day.

A five-minute weekly routine

To finish, here’s a routine that takes about five minutes.

Once a week, open Overview, set the range to the past week, and read three things. Active alerts tells you what’s happening now. Highlights tells you which spaces to look at. Device status tells you whether any of the sensors need maintenance.

If a space needs a closer look, click through to it and use the historic charts to find out when the problem happens. A CO₂ level that climbs every afternoon is a ventilation problem you can schedule around; one that never comes down is something else entirely.

And once a month, open All Sensors, switch to Scores, sort by the column you care about, and see whether last month’s problem spaces have improved. That’s it — the data is already there. These three pages are how you use it.

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Related guides

• Configure alert thresholds — set the ranges that decide when an alert is raised.
• Manage Alerts — what to do with an alert once it appears.
• Email Notifications and Mobile App Notifications — choose how you hear about them.
• Troubleshoot Inactive LTE devices and Troubleshoot Inactive Wi-Fi devices — for anything in the offline column.