London Air smart home integration, free and open source

London air quality from London Air (Imperial College): DAQI index by borough and by site.

• Published by guim31
• Devices
• Version 1.0.0
• Requires Gladys >=5.2.0
• ★ 0

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London air quality from the London Air Quality Network (LAQN), run by the Environmental Research Group of Imperial College London: the UK Daily Air Quality Index (DAQI) of each borough and each monitoring site, hour by hour, with the index of each pollutant.

Not affiliated with London Air or Imperial College London. The data come from its open API (api.erg.ic.ac.uk), used as London Air publishes it.

What it does

• Reads the hourly London Air bulletin, with no account and no key: one request every 30 or 60 minutes covers every borough and site.
• Creates one device per borough (the worst index of its sites) and one device per monitoring site you choose, 10 in all at most: the DAQI (1 to 10), its band as a word, the index of each pollutant measured (PM2.5, PM10, NO₂, O₃, SO₂) and the age of the bulletin.
• Adds a London air quality dashboard widget, two scene triggers (air pollution rising, back to low) and a scene action Get the air quality.
• Finds a borough or a site by its name or code, or the nearest ones to your house.

Read only: the integration only reads public data.

Requirements

• Gladys Assistant 5.2.0 or later.
• Internet access from Gladys to api.erg.ic.ac.uk.
• To search around your house: its location, in Settings → Houses.

Configuration

Choose the boroughs and sites

1. Open the integration's Configuration tab.
2. Click Find an area: type a borough, a place or a site code (Camden, Marylebone, MY1), or leave it empty to list the boroughs and sites nearest to your house, with their distance.
3. Type the boroughs you want into Boroughs, by name or number, separated by commas (Camden, Westminster), and the sites into Sites, by code (CD1, MY1). Save.
4. In the Discovery tab, add them to Gladys.

A borough sums up its area; a site, close to home or to a school, tells what you breathe there (a kerbside site on a main road reads much higher than a background site). The London Air map shows every site.

Other settings

• Refresh: every 30 minutes (default) or every hour. London Air publishes one bulletin per hour: reading more often would bring nothing.
• Language: language of the feature names (set when a device is added, so choose it first) and of the scene texts. French by default.

The Check the areas button reads the bulletin now and tells what each borough and site gives, and which names or codes are not understood.

Devices

One device per borough (London Air <borough>) or per site (London Air \<site name>).

Feature	Values
Air quality index (DAQI)	1 to 10, the worst pollutant
Air pollution	the band as a word, in your language
PM2.5, PM10, NO₂, O₃, SO₂ index	1 to 10, each pollutant
Bulletin age	minutes since the hour of the bulletin

Only the pollutants the site (or a site of the borough) measures are created. The hourly bulletin gives indices, not concentrations: each pollutant feature is its index on the same 1 to 10 scale.

The Daily Air Quality Index of the UK has four bands: Low (1 to 3), Moderate (4 to 6), High (7 to 9) and Very high (10). The worst pollutant sets the index. A borough takes, pollutant by pollutant, the worst of its sites.

A pollutant with "No data" keeps its last value for 3 hours (so that a gap does not fire the scenes), then publishes nothing. A bulletin older than 6 hours is no longer published as current: Gladys keeps the last values with their date, and the widget says the data are outdated.

Widget

London air quality:

• with a borough or site chosen: up to four pollutant tiles, the band colored (green Low, orange Moderate, red High and Very high) and the age of the bulletin;
• without: one row per borough or site, its band colored.

Scenes

Trigger: London Air: air pollution rising

Fires when the band of a borough or site rises to Moderate or worse, or gets worse again (Moderate then High fires twice). A change within a band (4 then 5) fires nothing. Filters: the borough or site, and the new band: tick the bands from your threshold up (for example High and Very high). Information for the actions: name, band, index, previous index, the pollutant that sets the index, a ready-made summary.

Trigger: London Air: air pollution back to low

Fires when the band comes back to Low after a moderate or worse episode. Filters: the borough or site, and the worst band of the episode (tick the same bands as above to pair both scenes). Information: the new band and index, the worst band and index of the episode, a summary.

The first index read after the installation sets the starting band and fires nothing; a restart does not fire the same change twice.

Action: London Air: get the air quality

The air quality of one borough or site, or of the worst of the added ones: summary, band, index, pollutant, the index of each pollutant and the age of the bulletin, for the next actions (a message, a condition).

Scene examples

• Close the windows: trigger air pollution rising with the bands High and Very high → send {{triggerEvent.data.summary}} and switch the ventilation off.
• Air again: trigger back to low with the same bands → send "You can open the windows again".
• School run: at 7:45, action get the air quality on the site near the school, then send its summary.
• Purifier: when the PM2.5 index of your borough reaches 4, switch the air purifier on.

Troubleshooting

• "No borough or site yet" on the Configuration screen: type at least one borough or site, or check the spelling with Check the areas.
• "no monitoring site in this borough" or "not in the London Air bulletin": some boroughs have no site in the hourly bulletin (Barnet, Bromley, the City of London… at the time of writing), and a site may be out of service. Find an area lists the ones that report, with their number of sites.
• "Not London Air boroughs": the name is not in the list; type it as Find an area shows it, or its number.
• Pollutant indices without value: the bulletin often says "No data" for part of the pollutants of a site (last hour not received yet, analyser out of service); the index then comes from the others.
• "The London Air API does not answer": the values are kept and read again at the next refresh. The Logs tab tells the error once, and its end.
• Details in the integration's Logs tab (LOG_LEVEL=debug for more).

Limits

• Hourly bulletin: indices, not concentrations, and often "No data" for part of the pollutants.
• The bulletin arrives late: on 24 October 2026 at 10:40, the latest one was that of 08:00. The bulletin age feature shows it.
• These are measurements, not forecasts.
• London Air publishes no rate limit: the integration makes one request every 30 or 60 minutes, whatever the number of areas, only while one of them is added to Gladys.
• The triggers follow the bands as published: a band that hesitates between two values fires each change.

Configuration settings

These are the settings London Air asks for in its configuration screen in Gladys.

Setting	Type	Required	Description
London air quality	section	No	Reads the hourly bulletin of the London Air Quality Network (Environmental Research Group, Imperial College London) through its open API, without account. Not affiliated with London Air or Imperial College London.
Boroughs	string	No	London boroughs to follow, by name or number, separated by commas: one device each, with the worst index of its sites. "Find an area" below lists them.
Sites	string	No	Monitoring sites to follow, by their code, separated by commas: one device each. Boroughs and sites together: 10 at most.
Refresh	select	No	London Air publishes a bulletin every hour.
Language	select	No	Language of the feature names (set when a device is added) and of the scene texts.

How to install London Air in Gladys

1. In Gladys, open Integrations: London Air appears in the catalog, next to the native integrations, with a community badge.
2. Click Install. Gladys pulls the Docker image (ghcr.io/guim31/gladys-londonair:1.0.0), starts it in a sandbox isolated from the core, and generates the integration's interface (devices, discovery and configuration).
3. Open the Configuration screen of the integration, fill in the settings, and save.
4. You can also install it directly from its repository URL: https://github.com/guim31/gladys-londonair.

London Air requires Gladys >=5.2.0. The catalog inside Gladys refreshes every hour, so a new version becomes available at most one hour after its release.

Not running Gladys yet? It is free and open source: follow the installation guide to get started.

About external integrations

London Air is an external integration: a community integration packaged as a Docker container and published on GitHub, that Gladys installs in one click and runs in a sandbox isolated from its core. It is published and maintained by guim31, not by the Gladys core team.

• Browse all integrations, native and community
• Build and publish your own external integration
• Source code on GitHub — source of this documentation

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