A Breath of Fresh Air

The adorable beast here is my dog, Bo. He may look tough and scary (not really), but like 55 percent of Americans, and my wife, who was unwilling to have her photo taken for this post, he has allergies.

To be exact, he and my wife have seasonal allergies. In Bo’s case, this leads to incredibly itchy skin and watery eyes the entire summer. In my wife’s case, it leads to congested sinuses and a horrible night’s sleep. And if she can’t sleep, I can’t sleep. Lovely how that works, right? So in a move born out of desperation, I asked if I might be able to try out one of our new air purifiers to put in our bedroom to see if that might make any sort of difference.

Once I got a hold of it, a few things struck me. First, it’s freaking cool looking! Instead of the traditional front grill and normal form factor, this thing is a sleek white monument to all things modern that’s all organic curves and blue glowing LEDs. But more importantly, it works.

After realizing the installed filter was still in a plastic bag and probably wasn’t doing its job (which only took two days – I’m a genius!!!), the change was pretty impressive. My wife’s sinuses slowly cleared out over the course of a week, and my dog wasn’t waking everyone up by scratching himself so hard his license and rabies tags jangled against the wall. Plus, the eau de dog permeating the air in the bedroom is completely cleared up. Even better, said wife is now sleeping incredibly heavily. She doesn’t even wake up at all when she pops me in the head with her elbow. Or at least she says she doesn’t.

A few things to note:

1) This thing moves a ton of air if you have it turned on high or turbo. Those are really good settings if you want to clean up the air in the room in a hurry, but they’re a bit noisy. Not 747 noisy, but noisy all the same. Turning the purifier on quiet or low is a lot better for sleeping. Or, if you’re a fan of white noise, turn on the jets and let it lull you to blissful sleep.

2) There are a few different sizes of this particular air purifier. It’s definitely wise to figure out how big the room you want to put it in so you can make sure the thing isn’t under or oversized.

3) Make sure you check the filter to make sure the plastic bag has been taken off of it. The system seems to work better that way. Not that I’d know from personal experience.