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Low Cost CO2 Sensors Comparison: Photo-Acoustic vs. NDIR

AirGradient air quality monitoring.

When you breathe out, you add organic components to the air which these sensors pick up and try to calculate a corresponding CO2 ppm value. There needs to be a certain minimum distance between the light emitter and receiver to achieve a certain level of accuracy and thus modern NDIR sensors like the SenseAir S8 that we use in our air quality kits are more than 3 cm long. Both sensors deliver very reliable results and the only difference that can be spotted is that the S8 seems to be a bit more sensitive and picks up higher values more.

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