Govee Smart Air Quality Monitor review: Simple but effective

Govee might be known for its lineup of colorful smart lights, but there’s a lot more to the manufacturer’s catalog than LED strips and smart bulbs. In fact, one of its newest products is the Govee Smart Air Quality Monitor — a tabletop device that measures temperature, humidity, and airborne particulates in your home. It’s a nifty little gadget, and it looks great on a desk or living room table, but it lacks some key functionality that you’d expect out of an air quality monitor.

However, if you can look past a few shortcomings, the Govee Smart Air Quality Monitor is a solid option for shoppers on a budget. It’s also a great choice for households equipped with other Govee products, as it’s controlled by the same powerful smartphone app and allows you to quickly customize its performance.

Easy setup and powerful app

Unlike some air quality monitors, the setup for this Govee model is quick and painless. No calibrations are needed, which allows you to simply take the monitor out of the box, plug it in, connect it to your smartphone, and start taking measurements. The display on the unit is large and vivid — its brightness is adjustable in the app — and it has enough space to easily display the temperature, humidity, and particulate matter that’s 2.5 microns or smaller (PM2.5). There’s also a function button on top of the unit that lets you swap out PM2.5 values for the current time.

One of the cooler features of the Govee Smart Air Quality Monitor is the color-coded air quality alerts that can flash across its display. Right under the PM2.5 value is a thin bar that’s usually green. As your air quality changes, so too does the color of that bar. Depending on your air quality, it can change to green, blue, yellow, or red to give you a quick visual cue about your surrounding environment. The bar will continue to change color even if you’ve switched the display settings to show the time instead of PM2.5, allowing you to essentially get four different readings on the screen at once. Considering the monitor is small enough to fit in your hand, that’s a pretty impressive feat.

Even more impressive is the functionality packed into the smartphone app. Aside from detailed graphs highlighting your air quality history, you can set up different alerts, adjust brightness settings, perform quick calibrations, or change the measurements from Fahrenheit to Celsius. There isn’t much of a tutorial to help you navigate all these features, but most users should be able to pick up the basics after a few minutes poking through its menus.

Some key measurements missing

While the Govee Smart Air Quality Monitor does a great job measuring PM2.5, temperature, and humidity, it lacks a few key features that can be found on more premium devices. The biggest omission is carbon monoxide. As one of the biggest threats to airborne quality in the typical home, it would have been nice to at least have an alarm that triggers if carbon monoxide approaches dangerous levels. It also lacks the ability to measure carbon dioxide levels.

When setting up the monitor, you’ll have to work around its wired connection, which could make it challenging to find a good location for it in your home. I ended up settling for a position on my desk, although it also worked great on an end table in my living room that was positioned near an electrical outlet. But when you consider the Govee Smart Air Quality Monitor’s price tag of $60, some of these omissions and inconveniences become more bearable.

Great for budget shoppers

While there are a few measurements you’ll be missing out on with the Govee Smart Air Quality Monitor, it’s still a solid all-around product. Its sleek design, adjustable display, and the ability to show three measurements at once make it quite impressive. You’ll also benefit from the intuitive smartphone app that lets you further customize its performance or check up on your air quality history.

If you need something more robust, however, it might be best to increase your budget. Few products in this price range can measure carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, or other dangerous particulates, and that holds true for Govee’s monitor. If, however, you need something that can give you the basics at a reasonable price (and is easy to use), then you can’t go wrong with Govee.

The Temtop M10 is worth consideration too — as it takes many of the same measurements without requiring a wired connection. And if you need something that can track more variables, be sure to check out our list of the best air quality monitors.