It’s a good air purifier to keep noise levels low for a sound night’s sleep, which is enhanced by sleep mode. Ft., which is why it’s widely preferred for smaller bedrooms and office spaces. It is a compact air purifier that reduces particulates by 99.97% in 30 minutes on its high setting. This unit is 8 inches wide and 14 inches tall, with a display shut-off function to avoid interrupting your sleep with bright lights. However, it has excellent clean air delivery rate (CADR) certifications from the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, which in some ways is a more rigorous measurement. (Read more in How we picked.) And it has always delivered exceptional performance in our testing at the 0.3-micron HEPA standard, on both new and old filters.
An air purifier with a HEPA filter will capture particulate matter down to the size of airborne viruses, including COVID-19. That’s why you often see manufacturers claiming their products remove 99% (or more) of particles in the air. Unfortunately, the science in 2023 simply isn’t clear enough on how quickly droplets containing the COVID-19 virus can be transmitted from person to person. That’s why our advice is to follow CDC guidelines for COVID protection, including getting vaccinated and wearing a mask indoors if you’re in an area of substantial or high transmission. This Dyson air purifier and fan goes above and beyond most, even destroying formaldehyde that your furniture may be releasing into the air.
It’s particularly amazing in winter, when the last thing you want to do is keep the windows open for the freezing cold air to clear everything out. Recommended for extra large rooms, this HEPA air purifier has 4 air cleaning levels to provide cleaner, fresher air. Clear the air of allergens, smoke, dust and pollen with the touch of a button. The Levoit Vital 100’s compact design makes it perfect for your bedroom, living room, kitchen or any large space. The High Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filter standard means a filter can capture 99.97% of the tiny, most-difficult-to-trap particles in the air — tiny means 0.3 microns in diameter, the size of some virus and bacteria bodies.
To clean the air in a small space—a bedroom, office, or dorm room up to about 200 square feet—it’s a solid choice. In 2018, we declared the Blue Pure 211+ “the stiffest competition we’ve found for the Coway AP-1512HH Mighty,” our long-standing top choice for general use. But after living with the Blue Pure 211+ for a year, we decided it’s best for large spaces specifically. It’s physically quite a bit larger than the AP-1512HH, both in height and footprint, and in a bedroom, playroom, or living room it can be a visually imposing presence.
And it performed very well in our tests, as you might expect when you run a large-space machine in a small room. However, on its medium-high and high speeds, it produced a persistent rattle that we could not ignore, nor could we fix the problem by repositioning the machine and making sure that the filter was properly seated. At its highest sub-50-decibel setting, which was speed three of a total six, the Air Pro performed similarly to our top-pick Coway on its medium setting, removing 86.1 percent of the smoke particles we’d filled our test space with in 30 minutes. That performance further bolstered our belief that the Air Pro’s HEPA filter, not its PECO technology, is doing most of the particulate removal.
What’s more, they feature an intuitive design, so you don’t need a PhD in particle physics to operate them. And it’s a breeze to move them from room to room, maneuver the controls, and change filters. In March 2023, we also began folding in owner satisfaction and reliability ratings into a model’s overall score. These ratings are based on Consumer Reports’ 2022 Summer Survey of 8,377 air purifiers purchased between 2012 and 2022. TruSens, an air-purifier maker that launched in early 2019, made a splash in earning a RedDot Design Award.
And the need to frequently wash the plates—and, once a year, take the whole machine apart and give it a deep clean—sounds like a hassle rather than a selling point. We tested the Blueair DustMagnet 5440i, the most powerful among several Blueair DustMagnet models, which is comparable in airflow to the Blueair Blue Pure 211+, our pick for large spaces. When we compared the DustMagnet 5440i at that size range with one of our standard-space purifier picks, the Winix AM90, the performance differences were negligible. But their price difference isn’t—as of autumn 2022, the 5440i typically sells in the mid-$400s, more than twice the AM90’s usual price. The DustMagnet design allows the 5440i to serve double duty as a small side table, because the air blows out of the sides instead of the top as on most purifiers.
The AP-1512HH has also demonstrated the ability to maintain its high performance for years, even as we’ve pushed its filters far beyond their stated one-year lifespan. We ran our original test model for two years without replacing the filter, and it still performed just as well in our follow-up test as it did on day one. We ran our second test model 24/7 for four years, and again we saw no change in performance, noise output, or reliability. Tim placed a TSI AeroTrak 9306 particle counter 7 feet diagonally
away from the purifiers, 20 to 30 inches from both walls in the farthest corner of the room. This put the particle counter well outside the airflow from the purifiers, eliminating the possibility of an artificially high measure of their performance and ensuring that the readings gave an accurate impression of the purifiers’ whole-room purification. The purifiers themselves sat at the midpoint of the opposite wall of the room, 2 feet from the wall, with no obstacles near their air intakes and outlets.