The Ultimate Air Purifier Test

We put several of the leading brand air purifiers to the test – a real-world test. Why? To find out which air purifier is best at cleaning a room.
Choosing an air purifier is confusing.

Terms like "True HEPA", "kills 99.9%" and "destroys pollutants" are misleading.

Purpose:
The goal of this test is to see how well different air purifiers clean a real room. Not a gimmicky little smoke-box, but a full-sized furnished room that humans can actually live in and want to keep clean.

Setup:
We take an air-sealed room, fill it with a consistent amount of smoke, and time how long it takes for the air purifier to clean the room to a healthy level according to EPA standards. The air quality is measured by the PM2.5 meter in the room, located where a person would be at the desk. The screen is enlarged on the top left corner of the videos.

Test Notes:
Every air purifier is tested the same way.
The room is furnished because that's how rooms are in the real world.
The air quality meter is positioned where a person would actually be breathing in the room.
The air purifier is located where it actually would be used in a room. Each unit is in the same place.
All air purifiers have new OEM filters.
The smoke is pumped in through a duct system. All ducts are air-sealed and connected only to the room.
The smoke particulates are between 1 and 50 microns.
The air quality meter is a laser particle counter that is calibrated and accurate, with a measurement range of 0-999µg/m3.
The green lights are to illuminate the smoke in the room so we can see how the air purifier is cleaning the air.
The time it takes for the air purifier to clean the room starts when the air purifier is turned on and stops when the PM2.5 concentration drops below 12µg/m3. This is the "healthy" level according to EPA standards. There is a 20 minute time cap on the test. If an air purifier fails to clean the room in 20 minutes, the "score" is the PM2.5 level at the 20 minute time cap.
The videos are all consistently sped up to 3x speed for the first 8 seconds, then 30x speed for the remaining time, so we can view the tests in a reasonable amount of time.

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