With the steep rise in air pollution in these past few months, the sales of air purifiers spiked and so did the number of new devices launched in the Indian market. Samsung, Sharp, Philips, Dyson and many other companies brought their latest tech to India but only a handful of these were able to stand their ground when a toxic haze engulfed Delhi after the festive season. We think that it’s high time to include air purifier as a category in our coveted Zero1 awards. Since the Zero1 awards are based on pure performance, you can be assured that the winner in any of the Zero1 categories is the best in class.
We tested a slew of air purifiers this year for the Zero1 Awards and out of those, the Sharp J60M-W is the winner of the 2018 Zero1 awards. The air purifier leaves no room for doubt when it comes to performance as it’s capable of improving the average air quality in a 200 sq ft room with a 12 ft ceiling height to excellent levels under 30 minutes.
It is an ideal performer in the harshest of conditions and to help achieve top level performance, it comes equipped with a high grade H-14 HEPA filter that has a total particulate retention of 99.99 percent. There is an activated carbon filter that removes harmful gases and TVOCs, and it employs high-density plasmacluster ion generator that generates both positive and negative ions surrounded by water vapour to considerably lower the amount of fine pollutants in the air. The air purifier is capable of almost completely remove cigarette odour from one of our test rooms in under 20 minutes.
Smart Air tried a different approach with its Ladakh Mini air purifier as it equipped large filters on a big fan. It is designed to filter large amounts of air at once and it works well, to a certain extent. It lost to the Sharp J60M air purifier by a hair as the Sharp J60M was able to bring the PM2.5 particle count down to single digits and keep the count down in the same room that has an area of 200 sq ft and a ceiling height of 12 ft. The Ladakh Mini also comes equipped with a carbon filter that is definitely above average when it comes to cleaning odour from the air. While the carbon filter should be included, it is optional. Overall, the Ladakh mini is a good performer that can is suitable for areas with high air pollution levels.
The Xiaomi Mi Air Purifier 2S is a good performer, even though it has relatively smaller filters and fan. Proving itself to be a value for money device, the air purifier has the ability to lower the PM2.5 particle count from thrice the threshold limit to permissible levels under 45 minutes. It comes equipped with a rather simple filter assembly that combines a pre-filter, a HEPA filter and a Carbon filter. Its squarish design features air inlets from three sides to suck polluted air in, filter it and expel it out the top. Even though it comes equipped with an H-11 HEPA filter, the particle retention rate of the air purifier is much better than one would expect. The inner activated Carbon filter takes care of VOCs and other harmful gases that one would find inside their homes. After testing, we found that the Mi Air Purifier 2S works best in areas of up to 300 sq ft.