Airthings Wave Plus Review: The Honest Truth

We bought the Airthings Wave Plus the week after Mom had a bad night — the kind where she was up at 2 a.m. with her inhaler, and the rest of us were lying in our beds listening, pretending we weren't. The next morning nobody said much. Dad made coffee. Hope drew a picture of Mom breathing fire, which was her version of a get-well card. And I opened my laptop and started looking at air quality monitors, because I was done guessing what was in the air we were all sleeping in. We had a purifier running. We had a routine. But we didn't have data. We didn't know if the CO2 was climbing at night when the bedroom door was shut, or whether the VOCs from Hope's school project glue were still hanging around two days later. We were flying blind, and I was tired of it.

The Wave Plus arrived in packaging that was clean and Scandinavian in that quiet way that makes you assume someone in Oslo thought very hard about the unboxing experience. Dad picked it up, turned it over, and said nothing for a moment — which, from a man who spent years watching people open boxes to create desire, is actually a compliment. He was checking for the smell. We all were. Off-gassing from a new air quality monitor would be its own small irony, and we take irony seriously in this house. There was nothing — no plastic smell, no adhesive, no factory floor. It smelled like nothing, which in this house is the best possible review a product can receive in the first thirty seconds.

What this post is going to settle is simple: does the Airthings Wave Plus actually tell you something useful, or is it a $230 mood light that makes anxious people feel like they're doing something? We ran it for six weeks. We put it in the bedroom, then the kitchen, then Hope's room during a particularly ambitious salt-dough phase. Mom checked the app. Dad cross-referenced it with his instincts. Hope named it Gerald. Here is what we found.

What It Claims

Airthings markets the Wave Plus as a comprehensive indoor air quality monitor that tracks six variables: radon, CO2, VOCs, humidity, temperature, and air pressure. The pitch is that most people have no idea what's actually in their home air, and that the Wave Plus gives you real-time visibility so you can make smarter decisions — open a window, run a purifier, or call someone about your radon levels. It connects via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to the Airthings app, displays a simple color-coded ring (green, yellow, red) for at-a-glance status, and stores historical data so you can identify patterns over time. Airthings positions this as a device for health-conscious households and anyone with respiratory concerns. No subscription required for basic functionality. They say setup takes minutes. They are not lying about that part.

What Actually Happened

We placed the Wave Plus on Mom's nightstand first, because that's the room that matters most. Within 48 hours we had already learned something we didn't know: CO2 levels in the bedroom were climbing into the yellow zone by early morning when the door was closed — not dangerous, but elevated enough to explain some of the groggy, stale-air mornings we'd been dismissing as bad sleep. We opened the door a crack at night. The numbers improved. Mom's mornings got a little better. That was week one. In week three we moved it to the kitchen during a two-hour papier-mâché session with Hope and watched the VOC reading climb in real time as the craft glue dried. We turned on the range hood and cracked the back window. The graph showed the VOCs dropping within twenty minutes. It sounds like a small thing. It isn't, when one person in the room has asthma and another is seven years old with her face six inches from a paste-covered balloon. The radon reading stayed consistently low, which was a relief we hadn't realized we were waiting for. Boldo's corner registered fine. Gerald, as Hope now calls it, just sat there collecting data without complaint.

What Works

The radon monitoring alone justifies serious consideration of this device — radon testing is one of those things most households never do and should, and having a continuous long-term reading rather than a single point-in-time test is genuinely more useful. Beyond that, the CO2 tracking proved to be the most immediately actionable data in our house: it changed a specific behavior (closing the bedroom door at night) that had a measurable effect on air quality and, by extension, on how Mom slept. The app is well-designed — clear, not cluttered, and it shows historical trends rather than just current readings, which means you can see that VOC spike from Tuesday's glue project is gone by Thursday morning. The wave motion to trigger a reading without opening your phone is a small feature that turns out to be one you use more than you expect. Battery life has been solid across six weeks with no signs of flagging. Setup was genuinely fast.

What Doesn't

The Wave Plus is a monitor, not a solution — and that distinction matters more than the marketing makes clear. It will tell you your VOCs are elevated; it will not do anything about them. For a household already managing asthma, this means the Wave Plus works best as a companion to purifiers and ventilation habits, not a replacement for thinking about those things. The CO2 and VOC readings are also not laboratory-grade precision instruments, and the app doesn't go out of its way to contextualize what the numbers mean for someone with a specific respiratory condition. The color-coded ring is helpful for quick glances, but Mom, who actually needs to understand the air she's breathing, had to do her own research to figure out what a VOC reading of 450 ppb meant in practical terms for someone with her history. A little more in-app health context — not medical advice, just framing — would make this device meaningfully more useful for the households most likely to buy it.

The Boldo Report

Boldo sniffed Gerald once on the nightstand, decided it posed no threat to his territory or his snack schedule, and has ignored it with complete confidence ever since.

The Verdict

The Airthings Wave Plus earns 4 out of 5 lungs — 🫁🫁🫁🫁 — and it earns them honestly. This is not a device that cleans your air. It is a device that tells you the truth about your air, and in a household where someone's respiratory health depends on more than hope and a good filter, that truth turns out to be worth quite a lot. It changed at least two concrete behaviors in our house within the first two weeks, and the radon monitoring is a genuine public health service for anyone who has never tested and doesn't know what's under their floors. Buy it if you have asthma, allergies, or anyone in the household who is medically sensitive to air quality — or if you simply want to stop guessing. Pass on it if you're looking for something that actively improves the air rather than measures it, or if you're not willing to act on what it tells you. The data is only as useful as what you do next. In this house, we did something next. That's the whole point.