Aetherfield — User Manual

Aetherfield reads AirGradient air-quality monitors over your local network. It needs no account, no subscription and no internet connection — the app talks straight to the monitor in your house. An AirGradient cloud account is optional, and only needed for monitors somewhere else.

What you need

• An AirGradient monitor — ONE (indoor) or Open Air (outdoor)
• Firmware 3.0.10 or later, which is what serves the local API
• The monitor and your device on the same Wi-Fi network
• iOS or iPadOS 17 or later

Adding a monitor

Tap +. There are three ways in.

On this network

Monitors running recent firmware announce themselves, and appear in this list by name. Tap one to add it.

By address

Type the monitor's IP address (192.168.1.42) or its hostname (airgradient_abc123.local). The address is checked before it is saved, so a typo is caught immediately rather than becoming a monitor that never shows data.

AirGradient cloud

For monitors that aren't on this network. Add an API token in Settings first — see Cloud monitors below — and your locations appear here.

No monitor yet?

Tap Add sample data to add a made-up monitor with two days of history. Nothing is contacted; it lets you see what the app does before buying hardware. Remove it like any other monitor.

Reading the numbers

Each tile shows a measurement, its unit, and a plain-language rating. Tap a tile to point the history chart at that measurement.

The colors

PM2.5 and PM10 use the US EPA's air-quality breakpoints, revised in 2024 — so "Good" for PM2.5 ends at 9.0 µg/m³, not the older 12.0.

VOC and NOx are relative

These are Sensirion index values, where 100 means "typical for this room over the past day." They are not concentrations, and they have no absolute meaning. A steady 100 is normal. Cooking, cleaning products, hairspray or a new piece of furniture can send the VOC index to 300 or beyond for an hour and then settle back. Treat the shape of the line, not the number, as the information.

A missing reading shows "—", never zero

Different models carry different sensors, and a sensor that hasn't warmed up reports nothing at all. Where there is no reading you will see a dash. A zero means the monitor genuinely measured zero, which is common and correct for particle counts in clean air.

History

The monitors keep no history of their own — they report only what they are measuring right now. So where the chart's data comes from depends on the source, and the two behave differently on purpose.

Gaps in a local monitor's chart are real, and the line breaks to show them. The app records only while it is open and in the foreground, so closing it leaves a genuine hole. The chart shows a break rather than drawing a straight line across, which would invent a trend nobody measured.

Local history keeps full minute-by-minute detail for two days, then averages into hourly points, so a monitor left running builds up a year of trend without the storage growing without bound.

Cloud monitors

1. In the AirGradient dashboard, open the hamburger menu → Place → Connectivity Settings and enable API access to get a token.
2. In Aetherfield, tap the gear, then Paste beside the API token field. The footer confirms the token is set and how long it is.
3. Tap +. Your locations now appear under AirGradient cloud.

Cloud readings are aggregated in five-minute buckets upstream, so a cloud monitor always lags one on your own network, however often the app refreshes. If you have both for the same device, the two will read slightly differently — that is the difference between the sources, not an error.

Settings

Under Monitors you can drag to reorder the dashboard, and swipe to remove. Removing a monitor also discards the history recorded for it.

Leaving it running as a display

An iPad on a shelf makes a good permanent air-quality display. Three settings help:

• Display & Brightness → Auto-Lock → Never
• Accessibility → Guided Access, then triple-click the side button inside the app, so it can't be swiped away
• Keep it on a charger

Consider slowing Refresh every as well — a display that never sleeps has no need to poll every ten seconds.

If something isn't working

No monitors found

• Check the local network permission, as above. This is by far the most common cause.
• Confirm the monitor and the device are on the same Wi-Fi network — not a guest network, and not one device on 5 GHz behind client isolation.
• Try adding it by IP address instead; that skips discovery entirely.

A monitor stops updating

The tile keeps the last reading and shows when it arrived, so a stale number is never mistaken for a live one. Check the monitor has power and Wi-Fi. Weak signal — worse than about −70 dBm, shown under Device — makes requests time out intermittently.

The cloud says the token was rejected

Make sure it is a long-term token and that API access is enabled for that place in the AirGradient dashboard.

Privacy

Aetherfield collects nothing. There is no account, no analytics, no tracking, no advertising identifier, and no server belonging to this app.

• Air-quality readings and recorded history stay on your device.
• Local monitors are contacted directly over your own network. That traffic never leaves your home.
• If you add an AirGradient cloud account, the app contacts api.airgradient.com using the token you supply, to fetch readings for your own locations. That is a request to AirGradient, under their privacy policy; nothing is sent anywhere else.
• Your API token is stored on your device and is sent only to AirGradient.
• Removing a monitor deletes its recorded history. Deleting the app deletes everything.