Like many of you, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with WFH life. Things I love: constant access to my fridge, the freedom to wear trackpants at all times, and getting to sleep in. Things I hate: being eternally alone, video meetings where I look at myself the whole time thinking “why are you so awkward”, and my freezing room.
Basically, the room I work from at home is an ice box. It was something I tolerated before this period, because I wasn’t in it for eight hours a day, five days a week. I’d just be there for a bit at a time, usually in the evenings.
But now I have frozen fingers, always. That meant finally looking into an actual heater – not one of those dinky ones you get from a reject shop, like a real one that actually does something.
Everyone goes on about the Dyson heater. You’ve heard about the Dyson heater. The bloody Queen of England probably has the Dyson heater. That’s how hyped they are – people who own them swear by them, people who don’t wish they had one.
I decided to actually put one to the test. What is so bloody great about the $600+ bad boys? I am a die-hard Dyson fan – you’ve probably read about my obsession with their Supersonic hair dryer and their vacuum cleaners.
But that doesn’t mean I’m down to just throw hundreds at anything they make without sussing if it’s worth the cashola. So I borrowed the Dyson Pure Hot + Cool Purifier Fan Heater.
It is $899. That is NOT cheap. You don’t just randomly buy this baby on a whim. Which is exactly why I wanted to road-test it.
To start with, I’m a big fan of the purifying tech Dyson have put into their newer breed of cooling and heating products. During the smoke crisis over December and January (god, remember the bushfires? Why is 2020 such a shitstorm) my desktop Dyson air purifying fan, which I’d previously just used as a desk fan, was doing some great work eliminating the smoke that seeped into my room. You can see the pollution levels on the screen – red is bad, and every day when I switched it on in summer, it was at Peak Bad.
So if you have a room that, say, opens onto the road or you live in a particularly smoggy area, the Dyson Pure Hot + Cool is already doing some extra work for you in cleaning the air around it. Today, mine started in the low yellow area (medium) and is now on green. I can’t say I’m noticing the difference right now, but I absolutely did back when the room smelled of smoke in summer. Search Dyson and air purifying and you’ll find scores of other reviews from folks who benefitted from the tech during the smoke situation, too.
To use the Dyson Pure Hot + Cool as a heater, you set a temperature and get to see what temp the room is currently at.
If you have it on auto mode, it’ll power up to heat the room to whatever temp you set (for example, 22 degrees) and then power down to maintain that temp. Basically it’ll blast away, get you to whatever temp you wanted the room, then chill out so you’re not wasting max power.
This is a game-changer for me. I’ve had heaters – cheap ones – that claimed to do this, but they would take forever to heat the room up and then I’d feel like the temp dropped significantly before they got going again. The Dyson Pure Hot + Cool genuinely maintains that room temp, in my experience. I sometimes forget it’s even on because once it reaches the temp you want, it just gently works in the background to keep it regulated. It basically will heat your room up quickly, then only go on/off as needed.
This is me except positively so:
I think this is probably the key win for me – in the past, smaller and cheaper heaters I’ve had needed to be on full blast at all times to maintain a warm room. That’s a LOT of power being used and led to a wild electricity bill.
I haven’t yet had a bill come through since using the Dyson but if the general concept of energy consumption is working at max power = more $$$, I’m assuming it’ll be significantly lower than when I had to pump my smaller heater all day to keep warm.
A word from the wise by the way – it’s REALLY easy to forget you have left your Dyson heater on because it’s damn quiet when it’s on auto mode. I have legit had to set a timer to remind myself to turn it off once I’m done with work.
Okay, here’s the downside for me – I’m not a fan of the cooling function. If you just need air flow, it’s great. But if you want aggressive power to literally cool down a room, I don’t think the Dyson Pure Hot + Cool will do it for you.
That being said, the only fans that HAVE done that for me are those intense power, industrial metal types you can get from Bunnings. In general, living in humid Sydney has meant I either need to power one of those up (you know the ones, where they sound like an aircraft taking off) or use air con. I guess you could try the old ice-in-front-of-the-fan thing, too? Basically, this product isn’t a miracle worker – it’s not going to function like an air conditioner just because it looks like one.
So, is it worth the money? Yes – if you have it, and you want a heater that works fast and efficiently. I think it becomes an even wiser spend if you feel the air quality in your house isn’t crash hot. But it is a lot of money, you need to be willing to make that investment – and in my opinion, the cooling benefits just aren’t really there for my environment.
That all being said, if you’re anything like me you’re sick of buying cheapo heaters that break or barely do anything. So if you’re down to invest, I do recommend the Dyson Pure Hot + Cool.
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