As the slightly insane mother of two, I reserve the right to panic about things like sexism in children’s books, the sugar content in every-bloody-thing and invisible particles in the air. I wasn’t always quite this ridiculous but there’s something about tiny, pure little lungs that makes me want to scrub the air clean for them. So I jumped at the chance to review the Dyson Pure Hot + Cool Link Air Purifier (and the permission to pass judgement was just an added bonus). So here it is:
Dyson Pure testers:
That’s us. One mum, one dad and two small kids. We live in Canberra with our cat Bella who coats our house in a fine veil of cat dander every day. Wonderful.
The unit:
The Dyson Pure Hot+Cool Link Air Purifier. This is the holy grail ‘do-everything’ machine for the air in your home. Not only will it heat or cool an entire room, it will pump out crisp, clean, healthy air while it does it.
Dyson claims the unit will remove 99.95 percent of gases, allergens and pollutants in the air with the 360° Glass HEPA filter. Which sounds pretty seductive to a sensitive lass like me.
Why we wanted to try it:
Allergies.
Sarge is allergic to cats; which is an unfortunate allergy to have when you’ve been living with a cat for 14 years.
I suffer from debilitating hay fever. Every year I’ll be walking around like a normal person and suddenly, on an arbitrary day in October, I’ll be felled like a pine tree, knocked senseless by the itching eyes, crawling throat and throbbing nose. Every year I tell myself I’ve never been this sick before.
I also have a supernatural sense of smell, which is pretty much the worst superpower you could ever have. I’m a bloodhound in human form and it sucks. The world stinks FYI. You’re all just walking around breathing it in like it ain’t no thing and I’m quietly gagging as you do it.
And I have an irrational preoccupation with poo particles in the air. THEY’RE THERE PEOPLE. EVERYWHERE.
The kids seem to have escaped the frailties of their parents’ sinuses but I’d like them not to breathe in the poo if at all possible.
Also: Canberra, the Capital, home of roasting summers and arctic winters. We will take any and all air-conditioning gadgets you’ve got going.
First impressions:
This is one sexy unit, which is not something I’ve ever thought I’d say about an air filter. But Dyson specialises in making inherently unsexy gadgets look a bit arty. I do not hate having this in my house. It’s not something I feel I’d need to pack away when people come over and I’m ok with it being in the background of photos. #instalife
The unit comes with a remote control, which, blessedly, is magnetised so it sticks to the top of the unit. Most people wouldn’t care but when you come from a family that spends 73 percent of its time searching for the TV remote, you’d understand.
You can also control the unit with the Dyson app which not only lets you fiddle with the settings, set a timer and switch it on before you even get home, it also lets you monitor the air quality in your home so you can see, at a glance, if the unit is working or not. I’m not going to lie, it can become addictive. There’s a weird sort of satisfaction that comes when you see filthy air become cleaner and cleaner.
Heating and cooling:
We first got the unit at the end of April and had about a week of really warm days so we had a chance to test out the cooling function of the Dyson Pure.
This is not an air-conditioner. It won’t blast icy air into the room and it won’t really drop the temperature by a noticeable amount. It works much the same way as any pedestal fan would work. You can set the Dyson Pure to oscillate around the room and you can set it to blast air directly at you or you can diffuse the air to spread it around a bit more. So, if you’re in need of a cool breeze, this will work well. If you’re in a sweat box and need to bring the temperature of the room down, this probably won’t be the miracle you’re looking for.
The heating function is far better and we’ve really put it to work over the past few of weeks. We’ve used it downstairs in the mornings when the temperature has hit zero outside and our large living space is feeling icy. The Dyson can bring the temperature up remarkably fast for such a small unit.
It can become very noisy when you’ve got it set to the higher speeds though. It’s not an annoying sound, more like white noise, but it will drown out the sound of the TV or radio, even at half speed.
Air filtration:
The most disappointing part of this whole trial was our air quality. Apparently, the air quality in our home is really good. You don’t know how badly I wanted it to tell us we were living in a cesspool of airborne ickiness so I could watch our lives transform with the sudden introduction of fresh, delicious air.
Alas, our home is annoyingly clean. UNTIDY yes… because children. Dirty, no. The air is crisp, clean and healthy. Sigh.
This made it pretty hard to assess the air filter function. We had a couple of days where the air quality in Canberra was poor and it was good to see the air inside stayed clean.
We also saw the results on the nights we’d cooked something whiffy, like pan-fried salmon or chilli stir-fries. You know when the smell of garlic and onion lingers for hours afterwards? The Dyson mopped up those smells really well.
I have noticed a complete lack of whiffs and odours in our house lately. Not that our house would ever be called smelly but I notice all the smells because of the aforementioned nose, so a fresh, un-musty, whiff-free home is pretty important to me.
But, other than that, we were just cleaning clean air.
Allergies:
Hay fever season is not yet upon us so I haven’t personally seen the benefits of the filter yet, but I have HIGH hopes for the Canberra pollen onslaught at the end of the year. It’s always a shocker and although the purifier hasn’t had a massive workout yet, I’m still super confident it’s going to help me.
As for the cat man – at first we didn’t notice anything, but now that we look back, we’ve realised his symptoms have been pretty non-existent over the past few weeks. He’ll often get red, watery eyes at night and he sneezes like a mofo all the time (he’s one of those 24-in-a-row kind of bastards) but that hasn’t happened lately. It’s one of those things where you don’t notice when you feel normal until you really think about it.
Overall:
Look, this is an expensive gadget and it can be hard to justify spending this much if you don’t have a need for clean air in your home.
However, if you do worry about the stuff your kids could be breathing in, this unit will ease your mind a lot. It will let you know when your air is clean and will clean it when it’s not. The heating and cooling functions are an added bonus and when you add up the cost of separate fans, heaters and air purifiers, it starts to seem a lot more reasonable to spend around $800.
We’ll definitely keep using the Dyson Pure and rest assured, I’ll be camping in front of it when hay fever season hits.
The Dyson Pure Hot + Cool Link Air Purifier was gifted to our family for the purposes of this review. I was not paid to offer my opinion and I was not asked to give a favourable assessment. All opinions and images are my own.
2 comments
Sounds good – we need a dehumidifier up here in damp old Queensland – if it did that I would be sold!
Ha, we need the opposite down here in Canberra!! Sooooo very dry.