The Best Air Purifiers for Wildfire Smoke, Allergies, and Whatever’s Floating Around In Your Home

· Vice

What’s all this outdoor garbage doing floating around in your home, your safe space, your refuge, your castle? Do you really not mind that even when you’re lounging on your couch, watching HBO, you’re sucking diesel soot, dust mite carcasses, formaldehyde, and benzene into your lungs? You can do something about that, you know, and it’s as easy as plugging a trash-can-sized device into a wall outlet and stepping back.

That’s it. Aside from swapping the filter out once a year, maybe a bit more often, you don’t have to manage it, control it, or even think about it. The air purifier just runs in the background, unnoticed and a hell of a lot more independent than your cat. Or even your houseplant.

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I’ve been reviewing air purifiers for over six years, and I can afford to be picky with my recommendations and exclude the merely “good” air purifiers. There’s no shortage of excellent models out there that’ll keep your family healthier and safer from pollution, both of the kind that invades from outside and those that tend to cluster indoors, such as a beauty products’ aerosols and VOCs (volatile organic compounds) emitted by fresh paint and new furniture.

Not only that, but wildfires are worsening nationwide. The West has been living with it for a while, but even the East Coast has been getting slammed the past few years from Canadian wildfire smoke wafting down. And yeah, your allergies really are getting worse, too. It’s not just your imagination. The American Lung Association talks about how the changing climate is making them worse for everybody.

Buy an air purifier now, because when the air worsens suddenly it’ll be hard to find one in stock, and it probably won’t arrive in time to keep you from breathing in a load of junk that should never be in your home in the first place, let alone your lungs. Me, personally? I always have a pair running in my home, 24 hours a day.

Quick List: The Best air purifiers

how we tested

I’d open windows and the front door, burn food in the oven (yeah, on purpose, totally…), and toss stinky, stanky, sweat-soaked gym clothes down in front of the air purifiers, just to let all the magic pollution of New York City waft into my apartment and see how the air purifiers dealt with it. Because I’m paid to be skeptical, I used a TempPro TP49 air quality monitor, a model I’ve found over the years to be quite accurate, to verify that air purifiers that said the air was clean weren’t just lying to my face and my lungs.

I also brought smaller air purifiers into my bedroom to see if they’re noticeable and distracting when trying to fall asleep, and I even tossed some dog and cat fur into the air. The cat fur came from an actual visiting cat, but the dog fur… yeah, I was just borrowing fistfuls of fur from a German Shepherd I knew.

the all-around best: Coway AP-1512HH Mighty

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AP-1512HH Mighty (opens in a new window)

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This is what’s lived in a succession of my bedrooms for nearly seven years, and it’s still going strong with typical Coway reliability. It’s never once given me a hiccup or needed repair. That’s 24 hours a day. And the Coway AP-15HH Mighty is quiet enough that on its lowest setting I can’t hear it when I’m lying in bed 10 feet away. Its automatic setting monitors the air quality constantly and ramps up the fan when it detects elevated pollution or dust in the air.

Coway’s True HEPA filter captures 99.999 percent of mold spores, pollen, dust mites, aerosols, dust, particulate, viruses, and pollutants over 0.01 microns, and the carbon filter soaks up odors, like pet smells and trash that’s overdue to be taken out. Lots of air purifiers will avoid mentioning that they’re not True HEPA and don’t meet these impressive specifications.

the coway airmega 200m, the same air purifier as the ap-1512hh mighty, just with a different look – Credit: matt jancer

Mine is the Coway Airmega 200M, which is functionally the same air purifier with a different look. Unless you’re particularly set on the looks of one over the other, buy whichever is cheapest at the moment.

Coway’s AP-1512HH Mighty and Airmega 200M are ideal for rooms of about 350 square feet. Don’t pay attention to the way most air purifier companies rate their air purifiers’ coverage. They’re often too optimistic. You want 5 ACH for thorough air purification of a room’s air, and that equals 350 square feet for the AP-1512HH Mighty/Airmega 200. Perfect for bedrooms and offices.

For Large Rooms: Coway Airmega 250

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Airmga 250 (opens in a new window)

Available at Amazon Buy Now (opens in a new window)

Like all of the Coways I’ve used over the years, the Airmega 250’s True HEPA filter captures 99.999 percent of mold spores, pollen, dust mites, aerosols, dust, particulate, viruses, and pollutants over 0.01 microns. Unlike the Coway AP-1512HH, the Airmega 250’s odor-absorbing carbon filter is integrated into the HEPA filter. It does, however, have the all-important automatic setting that monitors air quality and speeds up the fan when it detects heavy pollution or particulate floating around the room.

Coway Airmega 250 – Credit: Matt Jancer

Coway’s not as forthcoming on the Airmega 250’s ACH (air changes per hour) as on some of its other air purifiers. A little simple arithmetic spins up a figure of 5 ACH for 372 square feet of coverage. Like any air purifier, you want a 5 ACH or so, and most brands will give you the square footage for 1 or 2 ACH, which makes them sound like they can handle larger rooms than they should really be used for.

That square footage rating isn’t much more than the 350 square feet that the smaller, cheaper Coway AP-1512HH Mighty (above) is rated for. I’ve noticed that in side-by-side testing, though, the Airmega 250 reduced elevated levels of pollution in my larger living room more quickly than the AP-1512HH Mighty. If I were buying an air purifier specifically for a room at the top end of that 350-372-square-foot figure, I’d go with the Airmega 250.

Read my review of the Coway Airmega 250.

Tiny-Office Companion: Coway Airmega 100

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Airmega 100 (opens in a new window)

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The Coway Airmega 100 is one of Coway’s newer air purifiers, having been introduced in January 2024. Coway’s design language is all over the place, but I’m really enjoying the brand’s latest designs. The Airmega 100 is one of the slickest-looking air purifiers on the market, not something I usually say when it comes to a Coway, but you decide for yourself. Looks are subjective.

When it comes to small rooms, wedging an air purifier into a spare corner can be like playing architectural Tetris. The footprint of the Airmega 100 is less than the Coway AP-1512HH Mighty, and so it was easy for me to set up in my office. It’s so quiet I never seemed to hear the thing, only on the rare occasions when its automatic air quality monitoring sped up the fan to deal with nearby oven smoke.

How big of a room can the Airmega 100 handle? Don’t go by Coway’s optimistic recommendations. By the standards of aiming for 5 ACH (air changes per hour), its True HEPA filter can remove 99.999 percent of mold spores, pollen, dust mites, aerosols, dust, particulate, viruses, and pollutants over 0.01 microns in a room measuring up to 162 square feet. Think a room about 10 by 16 feet.

Read my review of the Coway Airmega 100.

The Luxury Jack-of-All-Trades: Dyson Purifier Humidify+Cool

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Purifier Humidify+Cool (opens in a new window)

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The Dyson Purifier Humidify+Cool was astounding in its feature set. And it’d better be, for $850. Packaging a very capable air purifier with a large-room humidifier and bladeless fan all into one machine doesn’t just raise the price. It also saves a hell of a lot of floor space that’d otherwise be divided among three separate machines. Despite the Dyson’s size, it’s a tall machine at three feet tall, not a wide one, and so it fits nicely into my small apartment’s kitchen/living room/dining room.

And it worked damn well at all of its functions. The machine is awfully smart, with a smartphone app that provides a detailed real-time view of your home’s indoor air pollution levels. No surprise that it’s an automatic machine and would kick into high gear every time I turned on the gas stove, or when the windows were open and pollen wafted inside.

Its HEPA filter captures 99.97 percent of allergens and pollutants up to 0.03 microns in size. Coway beats it slightly, but it’s not a huge difference. The Dyson did a stellar job at keeping my allergy-riddled visitors sniffle-free during their stay, as it sucked up all the pollen and dust mites in the air on a warm spring day.

Dyson is cagey about the square footage recommendations. Several retailers provide a rating of 112 square feet. It’s beyond me to figure out, in the near-total absence of a manufacturer-provided coverage rating, what square footage the machine can actually handle. I’d need a laboratory for that.

Anecdotally, though, it did a wonderful job in my fairly small New York City apartment at kicking into high gear when needed automatically, scrubbing the air of the sort of aerosols that give me headaches, and then quieting down to a whisper when it reverted back to its lowest fan setting. And hey, I could use it to humidify the room in the winter when the indoor humidity got too dry, which is a whole feature set I never see on other air purifiers.

For Big, Big Rooms: Honeywell Allergen Plus HPA5300B

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Allergen Plus HPA5300B (opens in a new window)

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Excuse the forgettable name. Honeywell rates the Allergen Plus HPA5300B for 4.8 ACH (air changes per hour) in rooms of up to 500 square feet. That’s a huge room. Think an enormous 20 by 25-foot bonus room that serves as the kids’ playroom, family computer room, and home theater room all in one. I tested one in such a room in a family member’s house after trying it out in my apartment. Frankly, I felt like it was overpowered for my small place and needed a tougher testing environment.

As I prefer with air purifiers, the Honeywell comes with an automatic mode that ramps up the fan speed (and therefore its ability to purify the air) upon detecting elevated pollution or particulate in the air. You don’t need to walk over and manually select anything.

Honeywell uses a True HEPA filter in the Allergen Plus HPA5300B. Even though Honeywell zeroes in on the filter’s ability to scrub the air of allergy-causing organic material such as pollen and dust mites, True HEPA means that it broadly removes 99.97 percent of particulate, pollutants, viruses, and even off-gassing furniture fumes, as long as the particles measure 0.03 microns or larger.

That’s quite good. Very good, even. That family member’s house was full of people who, unlike me, suffer from a range of allergies. I noticed nobody sneezed when the Honeywell was set up there, even though North Carolina’s springtime pollen bomb can be brutal.

The Silent Bedroom Air Purifier: Blueair Pure 511

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Pure 511 (opens in a new window)

Available at Amazon Buy Now (opens in a new window)

At barely over a foot tall and roughly eight inches in diameter, the Blueair Pure 511 is easy to stash in a crowded or tiny room, even if you have no vacant floor space at all. I used the Blueair Pure 411, which was the Pure 511’s predecessor, extensively. It was just as wide but three inches taller. I had no problem perching it on an end table and, later, an empty cardboard box.

Because of that temporary living situation, I had to sleep with the thing right up against my bed, two literal feet from my sleeping head. And you know what? I couldn’t hear a thing at night when it was on its lowest setting. Blueair gives the older model a rating of 17 decibels and the newer one 24 decibels, so the Pure 511 is a little louder. It doesn’t appear to be all that much, though.

There’s no automatic mode on the Pure 511, which I’d call one of its biggest detriments. You have to set it manually to the setting you want, and there’s no automatic version as Blueair offered on the old Pure 411. The other is that its filter isn’t True HEPA. Blueair calls it HEPASilent, which is a bit of a misnomer, if you ask me. Blueair says it removes 99.97 percent of undefined airborne pollutants, “tested on PM 2.5 up to 90 mins.” That means particulate matter of 2.5 microns, a lot larger than the 0.01 or 0.03 microns of True HEPA filters, like you’d see in the Coway. So it doesn’t perform as well, but the Pure 511 is also compact and cheap. That’s your trade-off.

The Pure 511 works well in rooms up to 165 square feet. Its predecessor lagged when exposed to a large living room, and it felt like I never got to take it off its highest fan setting. But it wasn’t made for that. In its natural habitat of a small-to-medium-sized bedroom, not a master bedroom, it was quiet and easy to place on a shelf. And I slept easily, even with all the dog fur and aerosol hair products wafting around the apartment. Everywhere except in my bedroom.

For Attics and Basements: Coway Airmega ProX

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Airmega ProX (opens in a new window)

Available at Amazon Buy Now (opens in a new window)

It’s a 51-pound behemoth the size of a Doberman, but if you want Coway’s largest air purifier, you’ll find it in the Airmega ProX. It’s overkill for most situations. Don’t bother with it if you just want coverage for a large room, like a 500-square-foot bonus room. Grab the Honeywell Allergen Plus HPA5300B instead.

But if you have a single room that’s absolutely huge, such as a small business office, an attic, or a basement with a wide-open floor plan, then you’re looking at the right air purifier. The ProX will complete 5 ACH (air changes per hour) in a space of up to 850 square feet. Visualize a room that measures 35 by 24 feet, and you’ve got an idea of how big of a space it can handle not just competently, but very well.

Just because it’s big doesn’t mean that the ProX’s air filters are any less capable than those on regular-sized Coways. You still get a True HEPA/carbon combination filter, as on the Coway Airmega 250, just larger. It soaks up weird smells and blocks 99.999 percent of particulates measuring 0.01 microns or larger, which is about as good as it gets, aside from hospital-grade air filtration. That means it filters out viruses, mold spores, allergy-triggering organic particles, dust, VOCs that off-gas from new furniture and paint, aerosols, and a bunch of other common pollutants that seep into your home from the outdoors.

Coway’s playing a bit fast and loose with the terminology of calling this a whole-house air purifier. You shouldn’t rely upon any air purifier to clean the air in your entire home because air doesn’t flow all that easily through doorways and thresholds, not as if it were one big room without walls. You know, like how you used to design your first house in a fresh game of The Sims.

But for an open space that’s truly enormous, like that attic or basement, the ProX is the best option on the market.

The real square footage rating

Most brands play fast and loose with their recommendations for how big of a room their air purifiers can handle. Too many of them are based on purifying all the air in a given-sized room one time in an hour. That’s otherwise known as 1 ACH, or air change per hour. That’s not enough. You want to aim for 5 ACH, as the CDC and EPA recommend.

Some brands, such as Coway, also display square footage recommendations for something close to 5 ACH, such as 4.8 ACH. Whatever. That’s close enough. And you can go a bit beyond or below the square footage ratings for 5 ACH. It’s not like if your room is 50 square feet larger than the 5 ACH rating smog clouds will form across your ceiling. If your room is much larger than that, though, bump up your criteria and buy an air purifier sized for that room. Your lungs will thank you.

the airmega 250’s combination hepa and carbon filter after several months of use – Credit: Matt Jancer

can i just get one big air purifier for the whole home?

One air purifier isn’t going to purify all the air in your home, unless you live in a studio, R/V, treehouse, doghouse, outhouse, Apollo moon lander, or one-room trailer. Some brands market truly huge air purifiers as “whole-home” units, but as Blueair points out, air purifiers are far less effective at cleaning the air in rooms other than the one in which they’re placed.

Get one purifier per room. Yeah, I know, that’s more money, but that’s how they’re made to work. Even if you get one huge air purifier rated for the total square footage of your home’s entire square footage, air won’t flow evenly throughout your home and make it to (and through) your purifier.

out slides the reusable pre-filter screen for cleaning, easier than any other air purifier i’ve used – Credit: Matt Jancer

I don’t expect you to put an air purifier in every single room, so get one for each room in which you spend a lot of your time. One per occupied bedroom, one for each of your living rooms or bonus rooms where people mostly hang out, and perhaps one for your home office if you work in there often. Bathrooms, the laundry room, and that dining room that you use four times a year can do without an air purifier because you don’t use them enough to justify the expense.

the bottom line

You may have noticed I recommend a lot of Coway air purifiers. More than any other brand of air purifier I’ve tested—Dyson, Honeywell, Blueair, Wynd—I’ve spent more time with Coways. I’ve outfitted my own home with a Coway Airmega 200M, an identical model to the Coway AP-1512HH Mighty, except in looks, as well as a Coway Airmega 250M and Coway Airmega 100. They’ve been running 24 hours a day, nonstop for up to seven years without a single hiccup, breakdown, or loss of function.

the coway airmega 200m opened up and showing the hepa filter and carbon filter – credit: matt jancer

Reliability has been perfect. Aside from reliability, Coways have True HEPA filters that suck up more than 99.97 percent of viruses, mold spores, pollen, particulate (such as soot and dust), and VOCs. That doesn’t mean they’re the only game in town. Any air purifier that has a True HEPA filter does the same.

Some have standout features, though, such as being particularly quiet or packaging in all sorts of related functions, such as humidifying the air. Whatever your choice, we’re living in a golden age of air purification, which is just as well, since we’re living in a golden age of air pollution, too.

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