Compare Air Purifiers

Consumer Reports does a comparison of the best selling  brands of air cleaners on a yearly basis. "Best buy" recommendation from CU are so trusted by consumers that the air purifiers they anoint as "best" often go on to become best sellers. A careful examination of the criteria used by CU however may just make you re-think the value of those recommendations. They're not perfect. CU recently got busted offering misleading information on car baby seats by the Feds. I could forgive them if it was an honest mistake, but falsifying evidence that could hurt the car baby seat industry? That's not good. Now if we can only get them to be forthright about air cleaners!

The first flaw we will bring to your attention is that CU does not test the best performing products, they simply test the best selling.  Hell, WalMart accounts for about 40% of all retail sales worldwide, including cheap plastic HEPA machines. Best selling vs best performing means that cheaper, lower quality, plastic air purifiers will get tested and evaluated. In the case of air purifiers, we can unequivocally say the top air purifiers have never been tested side by side by CU. The second problem we see with CU air purifier testing is that they do not measure an air purifiers ability to remove VOC's or chemicals from the air. Why? The mostly cheap store bought units they test cannot remove VOC's and chemicals!  Sure, cheap HEPA machines can remove dust form the air. However, they're noisy, they cost almost $1000 to operate over 5 years (per machine)  Most importantly, they can't remove VOC's and chemicals, things that make people sick. Why? Because it takes many pounds of carbon or special oxidizers similar to the ones found in the Air Oasis UV air purifiers to remove chemicals and VOC's from the air. What good is an air cleaner if it can't clean the things that can make your sick? That's what we really wan to ask CU.

Here is a comparison of the top air purifier brands in the world. Be sure to also check out our HEPA cost of operation comparison as well.   We hope that someday CU changes their testing protocol and tests the top air purifiers in the world and includes VOC and chemical removal capabilities. We're not holding our breath however.  See Comparison also: Compare BlueAir, Friedrich, and Ionic Zone IZ-PCO