Health Coach vs Weather Station

[stefnetatmo]

Hi there,

Looking at the website and the two products, the site its confusing in terms of what they are measuring.
Example:
PAGE1
netatmo.com/en-GB/product/weather/weatherstation

The Weather Station's Indoor Module measures your indoor comfort by providing vital information, alerting you when you need to air out your home to bring down its pollution levels.

Temperature
Humidity
Air quality
CO2
Sound meter

PAGE2
netatmo.com/product/weather/weatherstation/accessories#module

Additional Indoor Module
This wireless accessory can be placed anywhere in the home. It provides temperature, humidity and CO2 readings for the room it is in, sending you alerts when you need to air out the house, making it healthier. You can connect up to 3 Additional Modules to your Netatmo Weather station.

Temperature
Humidity
CO2

PAGE3
netatmo.com/product/aircare/homecoach

4 precise sensors
HUMIDITY
Know when to turn your humidifier on or off.
AIR QUALITY
Learn how to reduce indoor air pollution.
NOISE
Monitor the sound level to achieve a good night’s sleep.
TEMPERATURE
Make sure the temperature is right for you, day and night.

Looks like that the additional indoor sensor does less than the indoor sensor when part of the weather station package?

Also is that fair to say that the indoor sensor compare to the health coach is exactly the same in terms of information retrieved from the sensor appart of the app and the advice text?

Im trying to decide what to go for: if health coach or weather station as they are pretty much the same price now

[dhoggan]

Not sure I'm qualified to give a proper answer but I'll try...

Yes, the additional indoor sensor does less - there is no noise level sensor. I think there is a little confusion over the carbon dioxide and air quality sensors as I think they are effectively the same thing (unless anyone knows different) so in practical terms you're losing the noise sensor on the additional modules.

As for Home Coach vs. the indoor sensor that comes as part of the weather station: yes. Obviously you lose the noise sensor on additional modules. The difference is likely what you want to do with the data being reported by the modules. The weather station modules report to the cloud and so you can get some nice analysis graphs. The Home coach does not report to the cloud and so you will be limited to the mobile app for looking at the various sensor readings and historical data.

The other big difference is that Home Coach works (well, sort of) with Apple's HomeKit whereas the weather station is designed as a self-contained solution. So if you want to do some interesting things - for example, turn a lamp in the living room red (assuming a smart light bulb!) when the air quality gets bad, then you need some kind of integration, which theoretically Home Coach provides. But, before you buy based on this there are two points worth noting:

1) Home Coach integration with HomeKit is, err, basic - at least right now. It reports temperature, humidity and air quality, but not noise level. Also you cannot make use of this data in any meaningful way that a Home Control solution should allow. For example, it reports the temperature, but there is no way to create a rule to say "if temperature is above 23C, turn on fan" or "if after 10PM and the noise level gets higher than 75dB, flash table lamp red". There is only one trigger point - air quality - but you cannot set a threshold for it. Documentation for the HomeKit integration is very poor (none that I could find) so you're on your own too.

2) Many creative people have got the weather station integrating with other home control solutions via IFTTT. Some solutions (such as Smart Things) has support built in. But the weather station was designed as a standalone system and so this 'integration' could break if Netatmo ever change the way data is accessed on the web.

So, hopefully that helps make your mind up. I think Netatmo make some good products, but they seem more to be products the Netatmo team would like as opposed to what users are asking for. If you're after a home environment monitoring solution and don't plan to make use of the data gained for anything other than curiosity then it is a good solution (both Home Coach and Weather Station). If you are after a solution that will allow you to react to changes in your environment, then it may not be the best solution. At least yet...

[stefnetatmo]

Thank you very much for the answer and time you spent writing it.

The Home Coach seems to be targeted more for the family (even more for baby/Toddler)

The only use I see for the noise level sensor is if you have the little one sleeping in a room far away from his parents, and would like to monitor (crying/nightmare/night terrors activities).
Also to check if the noise level during the night prevent the little one from sleeping.

It would be nice to have both systems working together so you dont need two apps to see the information.

Thanks for the integration tips!