Breathe easier with the HomeKit-compatible Elgato Eve Room (pictures)

The Elgato Eve Room is a smart-home sensor compatible with Apple's HomeKit. The $80 device detects temperature, humidity and air quality.

The Eve Room is part of Elgato Eve's larger smart-home set of devices. The company showed them all off at CES 2015.

The air quality reading is pretty noteworthy, especially since it measures all volatile organic compounds, not just carbon dioxide.

Setup is simple. Insert three AA batteries, then install the free app on your iOS device.

Make sure you have your device's Bluetooth turned on, then open the app and it'll search for your device. Enter the code from the sticker on the bottom of the sensor, then assign a home and room where you'll place it.

Once it's up and running, you can take a quick view of all three current measurements, or expand any of them for a look at the data charted over time.

Double tap the small charts to pull up expanded charts that you can display by hour, day, week or month.

Since it's compatible with HomeKit, you can use Siri to check the readings of the Eve Room; just make sure you've updated those readings recently.

To test the air quality meter, we put the Eve Room in a box with smoke candles...

... and closed the lid.

As you'd expect, the air quality given in parts per million took a big spike.

The Elgato Eve Room can keep you informed about the conditions of your home. Especially if you've painted or done construction recently, the VOC sensor can be particularly helpful as it can tell you if it's safe to go back into the room, or if you still need to air it out.