To assist inform our air air purifier picks, we gathered 14 of the most well-liked fashions on the CNET Labs product testing facility in Louisville, Kentucky, the place we put them by means of a rigorous set of assessments. Our aim was to find out which air purifiers supplied the perfect efficiency by way of particle elimination effectivity, vitality consumption and calmness, whereas additionally evaluating their respective characteristic units and worth.
The particle-removal check
The air we breathe is not simply air. In reality, it is a mixture of human-generated and naturally occurring particles. The previous consists principally of city, industrial and automotive emissions of hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides and combustion byproducts, and the latter is usually represented by smoke from forest fires, sulfates, soot and matter from volcanic exercise across the globe.
Based on the EPA, a few of these microscopic solids and liquid droplets, which could be made up of a whole bunch of various chemical substances, are so tiny that it is virtually inevitable to inhale them. PM10 and PM2.5, that are particles of lower than 10 and a pair of.5 micrometers in diameter, respectively, pose the best threat to human well being since as soon as inhaled. They allocate deep into the lungs and even into the bloodstream, impairing the right performance of the lungs and coronary heart.
“That is the scale that may go into our physique, into our lungs and go into our bloodstream,” mentioned Zhao. “That’s the primary environmental threat issue globally. It kills about 6 to 7 million folks a 12 months,” he mentioned, as a result of cardiovascular or respiratory issues introduced on by particulate pollution.
Our customized air air purifier check chamber makes use of a clear-view entrance panel fabricated from plexiglass and gloved hand entry, which permits us to govern the air purifiers, a particle counter holder for our management gadget, two followers that guarantee correct mixing of the air and smoke contained in the chamber, vent ports that guarantee there’s a small quantity of recent air always, an ignition port to gentle up the smoke bombs from exterior the rig, and an exhaust port that removes the remaining smoke safely from the chamber and the constructing after every check.
The chamber will not be hermetically sealed, however it’s tight sufficient to make sure that no hazardous quantity of smoke escapes to the environment. Our mission was to create an atmosphere through which we uncovered every air air purifier unit to particle-saturated air of roughly the identical focus to evaluate how rapidly and effectively they get the air again to breathable circumstances.
We made customized smoke bombs, that are made of fifty% potassium nitrate (KNO3), 40% sucrose (sugar) and 10% sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) and included a security fuse for igniting it at a distance. The sugar acts as our gasoline supply, whereas the potassium nitrate acts as an oxidizing agent and the baking soda ensures that our dry combination sustains a sluggish and even burn.
Utilizing the Temtop PMD331 Particle Counter, we have been in a position to confirm that 5 grams of our smoke bomb dry combination produces roughly between 590 million and 610 million particles per meter cubed. The gadget is ready to depend particles of various sizes, together with PM2.5 and PM10, and it logs this knowledge as soon as each 15 seconds. Though we’re in a position to depend particles of various sizes individually, it is the full variety of particles we care about, which is the sum of all particles of various sizes.
We ready a 5-gram smoke bomb, which is ignited by way of the ignition port after putting in the air air purifier and guaranteeing correct sealing. As soon as the air within the chamber turns into particle-saturated (better than 580 million particles/m3) we activate the air air purifier in query. The information extracted from the Temtop permits us to precisely monitor the affect that the air air purifier has on the particle depend in actual time.
Noise stage
Utilizing a decibel meter, we measured how loud the air purifiers are at their low, medium and excessive fan settings. That is notably essential in case you plan on having your air air purifier on in your bed room in a single day and you don’t need it to disrupt your sleep. We carried out this check in our sound-enhancing studio to ensure that the decibel meter picked up solely soundwave stimuli from the air purifiers, excluding different doable sources.
Power consumption
To reply this query, we used a tool referred to as Kill-a-Watt and measured how a lot energy every air air purifier consumed at completely different fan settings. Understanding the vitality draw to your air air purifier might make a distinction to your vitality invoice.