Let Netatmo coach you to a better home environment

Like Netatmo's first product -- the Urban Weather Station -- the Netatmo Healthy Home Coach is a cylinder that sits in your home and monitors the conditions around it. Announced today and available now, the $100 Healthy Home Coach tracks the same things as the indoor module of the Urban Weather Station -- air quality, humidity, temperature, and noise. But, like the name suggests, the Home Coach also offers advice based on what it senses about the conditions in your home.

According to Netatmo, the advice takes your specific family into account. For instance, if you have a baby, you'll be told if you're keeping your home too cold for the well being of the child. You'll be told to ventilate rooms if the air quality is poor. And you can monitor noise levels and the rest of these measurements in real time and see their recorded history in Netatmo's iOS or Android app.

Do you need a coach?

You'll obviously need to tell Netatmo quite a bit about your family to get tailored advice, and I'm sure some parents will bristle at the idea that an app knows more about how to care for their child than they do. Knowing the conditions in a specific room can be quite helpful, but that's what the indoor module of the weather station is for. Honestly, I'm not quite sure why the Healthy Home Coach is being introduced as a new product rather than a software update to the existing app.

Still, if you just want an indoor module, the $100 Healthy Home Coach will save you money over the full $180 Urban Weather Station and maybe that's what Netatmo is doing here -- rereleasing the indoor module on its own at a discount with free advice packed in. That's fine, and since the Home Coach works with HomeKit, you can also ask Siri to check the status of your home.

Hopefully, you'll also be able to use the Home Coach to set up triggers via Apple's HomeKit app, so a fan automatically turns on if the air quality dips below a certain point. That's something we'll look for when we test it for a full review.

Outlook

You can buy the Netatmo Healthy Home Coach now via the company's site as well as at Lowes, Best Buy, Home Depot, and Amazon. Again, it's $100 here in the US. In the UK, you'll be able to purchase it for £100 starting October 15 on Netatmo's site. The Healthy Home Coach is not available in Australia for now.

At the very least, I expect the Healthy Home Coach to take accurate readings -- the Urban Weather Station does. If the advice actually adds anything to the experience that a person with common sense couldn't figure out by looking at the readings, then the $100 price could be well worth it.