How to Automate Your Home's Air Quality with IFTTT and Alexa Routines

For years, the promise of the smart home has been about convenience. We’ve taught our speakers to play music on command, our lights to turn on as we arrive, and our thermostats to learn our schedules. We’ve built homes that are obedient. But are they truly intelligent? The first wave of smart homes was about reacting to our commands. The next, far more profound wave will be about proactively responding to our needs—even the ones we can’t sense. It’s about building a home that doesn’t just listen, but cares.

And the heart of this new, caring home is its ability to breathe.

To see what that looks like, let’s spend 24 hours in a home that doesn’t just obey, but actively anticipates.

7:00 AM: The sun rises. Instead of a jarring alarm, the bedroom’s blackout curtains slowly open. A sensor in the room notes that the CO2 level, after a night of two people sleeping in a closed space, has crept up to 1100 ppm. The home’s automation system, seeing this, doesn’t wait for a command. It silently activates a ventilation fan on low, introducing fresh air to gently clear the morning “brain fog” before you even get out of bed.

11:00 AM: You’re deep in a work-from-home session. The CO2 in your office again passes the 1000 ppm threshold. A smart plug, connected to a small desk fan, clicks on, creating a gentle breeze and pulling in fresh air from a slightly opened window. You barely notice, but your focus remains sharp through midday.

6:30 PM: You’re searing salmon for dinner. The air quality monitor in the kitchen detects a sudden, sharp spike in Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) and particulate matter from the cooking fumes. Instantly, the nearby air purifier, which was on a quiet standby mode, roars to life at its highest setting. The kitchen range hood also kicks into a higher gear. By the time you sit down to eat, the air is already clearing.

10:00 PM: As you prepare for bed, the system notes the bathroom humidity has jumped to 75% after a hot shower. The exhaust fan, which normally turns off after 15 minutes, is instructed by the home’s “brain” to continue running until the humidity drops back below 55%, proactively preventing any chance of mold growth.

This might sound like science fiction, but every single interaction described above is achievable today, with off-the-shelf technology. The magic lies in connecting a sensitive “nose”—an indoor air quality monitor—to a powerful “brain” like IFTTT or Amazon’s Alexa Routines.

The Brain and The Senses of a Healthy Home

The revolution begins when you stop seeing your IAQ monitor as a passive display and start seeing it as the central sensory organ of your home. Devices like the Airthings View or Wave series, when connected to the cloud via a hub, don’t just collect data; they can broadcast “events” or “triggers” to other services. Each metric—CO2, VOCs, humidity, temperature, even radon—becomes a potential “if” in a powerful “if-then” statement that can command your entire smart home ecosystem.

The other key components are the “hands”—the devices that take action. These don’t have to be expensive. The humble smart plug is your best friend, capable of turning any simple, non-smart device with a physical on/off switch (like a fan, a dehumidifier, or an old air purifier) into an automated worker.

The Digital Glue: IFTTT & Alexa Routines

IFTTT (If This Then That) is a web service that acts like digital glue. It lets you create “Applets” that link different devices and services together. The logic is simple: If something happens on Service A (the trigger), then do something on Service B (the action).

Alexa Routines work similarly within the Amazon ecosystem. You can set a smart home device’s state (like an Airthings sensor detecting high CO2) as a trigger to launch a sequence of actions across any of your Alexa-compatible devices.

DIY Automation Lab: Your First Recipes

Let’s build some of the automations from our story.

Recipe 1: The Automatic Fresh Air Fan (Beginner) * Goal: Turn on a fan when CO2 in your office gets too high. * Ingredients: An IAQ monitor (e.g., Airthings), an IFTTT account, a smart plug, and a simple desk fan. * The IFTTT Applet:
1. The “If This”: Choose the Airthings service. Select the “CO2 level rises above” trigger. Set your device and specify the threshold, for example, 1000 ppm.
2. The “Then That”: Choose the service for your smart plug (e.g., TP-Link Kasa, WeMo). Select the “Turn on” action and specify the plug connected to your fan.
3. Bonus: Create a second, separate Applet that turns the fan off when the CO2 level falls below a healthier threshold, like 800 ppm.

Recipe 2: The Emergency VOC Purification (Intermediate) * Goal: When cooking or cleaning causes a VOC spike, automatically turn on your air purifier to its highest setting. * Ingredients: An IAQ monitor, an Alexa-compatible smart air purifier (like one from Levoit or Coway), an Alexa device. * The Alexa Routine:
1. “When this happens”: Choose “Smart Home”. Select your Airthings sensor. Choose “VOC” as the trigger and set it to “rises above” a certain level (e.g., 500 ppb).
2. “Add action”: Choose “Smart Home” again. Select your air purifier. Set the action to “Power On” and “Set fan speed to High”.
3. Bonus: Add another action: “Alexa Says”. Make it announce, “High VOCs detected. Increasing air purification.” This provides useful feedback.

A Friendly Warning: Patience is a Virtue
Setting up these automations can sometimes be fiddly. An app might not connect, a service might be down. The key is to start simple, test one automation at a time, and have patience. The reward—a home that silently works to keep you healthy—is well worth the effort.

The Future: From Rules to Intelligence

Mastering these recipes transforms you from a consumer of smart devices into a creator of smart systems. But this is just the beginning. The very definition of a “smart” home is evolving. Today, we rely on user-defined rules. Tomorrow, these systems will be infused with AI, learning your family’s patterns and predicting air quality issues before they happen. Imagine your home knowing you’re about to start cooking and preemptively increasing ventilation, or cross-referencing the local pollen forecast (a feature already in the Airthings app) with your indoor air quality to optimize filtration for allergy season.

By giving your home the senses to perceive its own air and the intelligence to act on that information, you’re doing more than setting up cool tech tricks. You are creating a responsive, resilient, and healthy environment. You are building a home that truly breathes.