Around six months ago, I was sent a Dyson air purifier for trialling. Essentially a fan but with the added benefit of clearing your air of pollutants, I liked it – but it was quite expensive for what, at the time, just worked as a fan for my room.
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The specific one I have is the Dyson Pure Cool Tower Fan, and it retails at a strong $799.
At the time, it seemed too expensive to write about considering most of us are buying $20 Kmart fans. But now the air quality in Sydney has dropped so chaotically, there are reports we’re breathing in the equivalent of 40 ciggies daily, I decided to revisit the Dyson air purifier and see how it fared in my bedroom at night, less from a cooling perspective and more from a air quality perspective.
When I first put it on, the bar on the digital display was on red. The display, by the way, shows you the air quality at all times.
As you can see, there’s a really small window for the shitty air quality, because it’s NOT MEANT TO BE IN THE RED. On days where the smoke has been less prevalent, I’ve turned it on and had the bar in the yellow. That just shows how fucked we are at the moment in Sydney.
Anyway, I left the fan on a low setting through the night. By morning, the bar was in the green. It had cleaned the air to the point where it was ~pure~ again.
The Dyson site has this little diagram to show how it works. Obviously, you don’t have green smog floating around your room (or DO you) but it essentially shows how the base is designed to suck air in, clean the shit out of it, then push it back out.
I wouldn’t say I noticed a huge difference, but then again most air pollutants aren’t obvious. For example, most airborne allergens aren’t visible to the naked eye. This air purifier gets rid of 99.95% of those ultrafine particles. As someone with intense hayfever, I really should have been using this more regularly earlier in the allergy season.
I think the best part is it’s quiet and non-intrusive – if you don’t want to cool your room down, you just want the air purified, you can set it to level 1 and it’ll just release a light breeze into your room. Can attest it doesn’t make it cold, unless you want it to.
Look, I’m not saying go buy a $799 fan because Sydney *might* be covered in smoke all summer. For starters, there are versions of the Dyson Cool that are cheaper – like the Pure Cool Me (which I DESPERATELY want for work, rn the office smells like it’s on fire for example), which is currently $399. Or the Pure Cool Desk Fan, which says it will purify the air in an entire room and is $649.
It really comes down to how much you need it and what disposable income you have – for me, I think if I knew the benefits I would buy one for myself (like I plan to do with the Cool Me) because I do, luckily, have the money and I suffer from hayfever, so there is a long-term benefit for me here too.
Here’s hoping we don’t have to deal with the Sydney smoke for months, though.
