Review on Dylos DC1100 Pro Quality Monitor: Reliable Air Quality Monitoring for Optimal Performance by Jared Coleman

I have mixed feelings about this device. It came out 10 years ago and to be honest I expected it to evolve but it didn't happen. You open the box and there is a wart on the wall. Not the ones that came with the product in the last 10 years, but these heavy analog transformer models. For $260, couldn't they have negotiated a more energy efficient transformer? So you turn it on and the display shows two numbers and this bar that seems to bounce every second or two. There are no markers to tell you what the numbers are, you must open the instructions to solve the puzzle. Would it kill her to mark the numbers? The bar represents the pollution level I think, but it would be nice to have the values averaged over a minute or two instead of a bouncing bar meaning nothing. So the two numbers shown are normal PM2.5 or PM10 or AQI right? No, they are NOT one of them. This is a measure of particulate concentration that cannot be compared to any traditional measure used today. So that can be converted to another common measure, right? NO. Read online and you will find 200 different ways to convert these numbers, but all these formulas give completely different results. Can't the company add this feature? Did they have 10 years? NO. And then there's the user interface, which provides very little information but makes it difficult to access. Even switching from "monitor mode" to "always mode" is certainly more difficult than it should be. So does it work? The numbers seem to go up with more particles in the air, but without some sort of standard measure no one has any idea how accurate this thing is, and I'm sure the manufacturer loves it. If the manufacturer had taken care of it, it could have been significantly improved. They didn't. I should also add that there is a sticker on the back of the unit that lists how many particles are good air, bad air, very bad air, etc based on the low count (higher count) readings. Basically he gives some calculations and says for example that 1050 - 3000 is bad. Sounds good. But sometimes the company said you could take (fine particles - coarse particles)/100 to get a PM2.5 rating. Let's look at that, let's say a little bit in the year 2000, right in the middle of the "bad" area. For the sake of argument let us assume that large particles are zero. So 2000-0 = 2000, then divide by 100, you get 20. So you're saying the PM2.5 value will be 20. But if you do your research, a PM2.5 of 20 is very good air, not bad. So you have a lot of scattered information, and maybe even 2 stars is generous for this thing.