If it's the former, it might be useful to make that more clear on your site as I could not confirm it.
With proper calibration, the PMS5003 sensor AirGradient uses is a real and fairly good measurement of PM1 (<1 micron), which is often fairly correlated with (and makes up much of) PM2.5. However, the sensor cannot really see particles larger than 1 micron, which sometimes matters for PM2.5 (when the PM1:PM2.5 ratio changes, like wildfires), and very much matters for PM10. That's why QuantAQ uses a PMS5003 combined with a different sensing technology (an optical particle counter) to actually measure PM2.5 and PM10, not just extrapolate from a PM1 measurement.
We have a blog post here explaining more: https://blog.quant-aq.com/can-your-plantower-pms5003-based-a...
I love the work that AirGradient is doing making AQ sensing technology open and accessible, especially to hardware hackers. The BOM cost of the OPC sensor we use alongside the PMS5003 is more than the cost of the entire AirGradient kit, so it is valuable to have options in the market depending on application.
What does affect air quality in my home massively, are the people parking their vehicles surrounding my home morning and afternoon as they drop off and pick up their children from the nearby school. I see a 10x ambient measure at these times. I was starting to think about how I could use BLE monitoring to track this somehow (the other thing my home is surrounded with at these times is devices broadcasting Bluetooth "beacons"(?)); could be an interesting experiment.
The next step for me is really knowing what and how something can be done about the pollution (generally speaking); Monitoring is great, but what's the next step?
Short term: install air filters
Long term: banning ICE cars
Also where there is good air, there ain't so many people.
A commercial model is around $200.
There are a lot of options so decide if you want to build it or buy it and plug it in!
Then you can list your data on a site like https://explore.openaq.org/
Then, I found a board from Adafruit. The chip is so tiny in the Adafruit photo!
Short answer, $1500 + $300 annually (includes cellular, realtime data calibration in our cloud, and full API access).
Relevant to the topic above, we are building for a slightly different market than AirGradient, and want to make sure we're an appropriate solution for potential customers -- you might genuinely be better served by a different product! As such, we're currently not optimized for low touch single sales to individuals, but it's something we'd like to improve in the future.
If you do contact sales, and we end up being a good fit for what you're looking for, we'd love to help!
All low cost sensors are using the laser scattering technique and thus do approximate the mass and not a direct measurement.
However tests show that PM2.5 is the most accurate and often PM10 in these sensors is not very good.