Power & Battery

Learn how your Air Lab manages power, how to pick a battery life profile, and what each power setting trades for runtime.

Your Air Lab spends most of its life asleep: it wakes briefly to take a measurement, refresh the screen, and go back to sleep. How long a battery charge lasts depends almost entirely on how often these wake-ups happen and which sensors stay powered in between. Three settings drive this—the Sleep Sample Rate, the Display Refresh rate, and the Gas Sensor Mode—and together they span estimated runtimes from a few days to over two months.

You don't need to tune them individually. Every surface—the device itself, Air Lab Console, and the Air Lab App—offers a battery life selector that moves all three settings together along a curated scale from Responsive to Long lasting.

Note: The power settings described here require firmware v1.0.0 or later. If your device is running an older version, update it first via Firmware Update.

Note: Runtimes are estimated from measurements of a sleeping device on a full charge. They don't include time spent awake or charging, wireless connections, or PM measurements.

Battery Life Profiles

The battery life selector walks an ordered list of preset configurations. Each step shows its estimated runtime and gives up responsiveness in a deliberate order: first the measurement interval grows, then the screen refreshes less often, and only then is the gas sensor duty cycled or switched off—because that last step costs measurement quality, not only latency.

• On the device, open Settings s, press R for Configuration, and select Profile in the Power section. Step through the presets with the arrow buttons or the touch strip—each shows its estimated runtime and the settings it would apply—then confirm with Save. Nothing changes until you save.
• In Air Lab Console, open the Power page and drag the battery life slider.
• In the Air Lab App, open Settings, then Battery Life in the Power section.

Out of the box, your Air Lab measures every 60 seconds while sleeping, refreshes the screen every 60 seconds, and keeps the gas sensor running continuously—about ten days of runtime. If you change the individual settings so that they no longer match a preset, the selector shows Custom instead, along with the estimated runtime of your configuration.

Power Settings

Behind the profiles sit individual settings you can adjust in the Power section of the device's Configuration menu, or under Fine Tuning and Advanced on the power screens of Air Lab Console and the Air Lab App.

• Sleep Sample Rate: How often a sample is taken while sleeping, from 5 seconds to 10 minutes (default: 60 seconds). This is the biggest single lever: the CO₂ sensor changes its operating mode with the interval, and intervals of a minute or more let it idle or power down between measurements.
• Display Refresh: How often the idle screen is redrawn, from 1 to 5 minutes (default: 1 minute). Each refresh wakes the device, so a slower refresh saves power at the cost of a less current display.
• Record Sample Rate: The sample rate used during a recording instead of the sleep rate, from 5 seconds to 5 minutes (default: 5 seconds). See Sample Collection for how the rates interact.
• PM Sample Rate: On devices with a particulate matter sensor, how often PM is additionally measured while sleeping, from 30 seconds to 5 minutes or Off (default: Off). Its cost hasn't been measured yet, so it isn't included in the runtime estimate.

Gas Sensor Modes

The VOC/NOx sensor is different from the other sensors: it heats a sensing element and expects to be read continuously. Keeping it running is what it's designed for—and also the single largest steady drain on the battery. The Gas Sensor Mode offers three ways to handle this trade-off:

• Continuous: The sensor runs at all times. Full VOC and NOx data quality, highest power use. This is the default.
• Duty Cycled: The sensor is only active for a window within each measurement interval, set by the Gas Active Window (10 seconds up to half the interval). A short window reads the sensor while it's still warming up; a longer one lets the reading settle.
• Off: The sensor is powered down entirely while sleeping.

Note: Duty cycling requires a Sleep Sample Rate of at least 60 seconds—below that, the sensor never sleeps and a window is ignored.

Duty cycling has consequences for data quality: NOx isn't reported while the sensor is duty cycled, and VOC readings become a relative indicator rather than a settled level. Switching the sensor off means VOC and NOx aren't measured at all, and their indices restart their learning period when it's switched back on.

The Gas Power Grace setting softens the transition to battery power: the sensor keeps running for the configured time after the device is unplugged—up to two hours—before its configured mode takes over. This keeps readings at full quality while you move the device around, without giving up runtime once it settles.