Breathing fresh air at home doesn’t have to be expensive, which is why we wrote this article to help you choose the best and cheapest air purifier out there. While there are many units in the market, the price could sometimes turn you off. We care about balancing your budget and health so we’d like to share some tips on getting an efficient air purifier that’s worth your money.
Whether your concerns include allergies, smoke, or any other pollution you might get indoors, air purifiers are always reliable, so long as it has the proper filters and maintenance. Because they don’t consume a lot of power, they can run all day without making you anxious about your monthly bill – and some units even run quietly to help you sleep!
To ensure that you only get worthy air purifiers, we’ve tested the units mentioned below by placing them in all sorts of indoor environments. This will help you figure out which air purifier to buy for your needs.
What’s the best affordable air purifier for allergies?
If you are often worried about allergic rhinitis or hay fever, the Shark HE601 Air Purifier is for you. We’ve tested this in a home with around 900 square feet of space. Since this air purifier is rated for up to 1,200 square feet of room area, it will be suitable for studio-type rooms or whole-house filtering small homes, condo units, apartments, and the like.
Just outside the testing site, the resident (one of our team members) has a flower garden and he’s always complained about getting hay fever during spring. Once he started running the 6-fan air purifier for 24 hours straight, our team member felt the difference.
The secret to this air purifier’s effectiveness in lessening allergy symptoms is thanks to its anti-allergen HEPA multi-filter, which will trap particles as small as 0.3 microns. Aside from that, it even has an odor guard for cooking smells to help you breathe easier.
Upon navigating the unit’s settings, our team member found it easy to check if the air purifier is doing its job due to its intuitive display (with color coding and “clean air” percentage) to inform you of the air quality levels.
How to choose the best cheap air purifier for smoke
Smoke is not only off-putting because of its smell but it’s also harmful to your lungs and overall health. Having smoke lingering around the house gets even worse if you have kids or guests coming and going – and they might complain about it!
So, if you’re looking for a smoke-removal device for your home or office setting, here are some pointers to remember:
Look for activated carbon
For many years in history, activated carbon has been a common deodorizer for smoke and other home doors – especially in the kitchen. We think that the BISSELL air320 is a great choice for the best air purifier for cigarette smoke removal due to the presence of activated carbon.
Here’s how our home test went: by placing it in the living room of the same team member mentioned above, he tried inviting a friend to smoke indoors (warning: cigarette smoking shouldn’t be done indoors and is dangerous to your health, too!) for the sake of science.
Our team member ran the air purifier on the highest setting (it has 5 fan speeds to choose from) and within about 3 to 4 hours, the living room was quite free from the off-putting tobacco smell! So, what happened, exactly?
This air purifier has a 3-stage filtration, which includes HEPA (H13 or medical-grade, which is a plus), a pre-filter, and of course, an activated carbon filter to trap smoke smells. Because it has 4.8 air changes per hour on a 327-square-foot home, it was able to clean the living room from smoke quickly. However, your results might vary if you tested it in a studio-type room.
More fan speeds = faster air cleaning
As mentioned above, the BISSELL air320 has 5 fan speeds for you to choose from, which is a great feature for quickly cleaning a highly-polluted room, such as with our tobacco experiment. Whether it’s the onset of an allergy or asthma attack or if there’s a wildfire nearby, having flexible fan speeds will help conserve energy and lengthen your air purifier motor’s lifespan.
If you put it this way, running the motor constantly on turbo speed will make its motor wear down quickly, which is why having a wide range of fan speeds will benefit both your air purifier motor and your budget for monthly bills.
Make sure it’s suited for your room size
One common mistake that people make when choosing a good air purifier is not considering the room size and the cleaning capability of the unit. For instance, we ran the air purifier in a home with 900 square feet of space although the living room has roughly only 200 square feet for its area.
By doing the math, you’ll know if the air purifier is suited for your needs. The BISSELL air320 is rated for 327 square feet so it will surely clean up the entire living room, but the cleaning results could be slow if you’re running it in a studio-type room due to lack of closed divisions.
The best affordable air purifier for large rooms
While our first team member’s home (from the previous tests) was already a big house, to begin with, we tried testing the Medify MA-50 Air Purifier on a different living area – another team member’s. The space in question is a 1,100-square-foot studio-type room so it will be a little more challenging to clean due to the lack of divisions.
She (our team member) lives with an orange Tabby cat named Oliver, and she confesses that he not only gets pet dander around her sofa but also likes to put his paws onto gadgets around the condo unit. That’s why we thought this would be a great testing site for the Medify air purifier since it has a child lock feature – specifically for curious little paws (or fingers if you have a toddler).
After we ran the air purifier for a couple of minutes, we noticed that it doesn’t smell very pet-like anymore. Our team member also noticed that her couch had less pet dander lying around, although we still advise vacuuming her condo so the filter won’t clog and suffer all the time.
Oliver, the curious Tabby in question, tried to fiddle with the air purifier settings but couldn’t get his paws to land on anything, which is a great plus point. After that, we left our team member to set the air purifier to run for 12 hours (the maximum timer option) before she sleeps. The next day, she woke up feeling fresher than usual, as before, her allergies would sometimes act up.
With that said, if you do have pets around the house and want to use an air purifier to help clean your indoor space, here’s what you need to remember:
- Never let your air purifier filters get dirty full of pet dander
- Don’t skip on your pet’s bath time and grooming routine
- Ensure that “child lock” is on to avoid curious paws ruining the settings
- Secure the air purifier to keep your pet from knocking it over
Our top pick for the best HEPA air purifier
If you’re looking for the best air purifier on a budget that comes with a HEPA filter, we suggest the Honeywell HPA300 with its 465-square-feet of cleaning range. What makes this unit the best (in our honest opinion) is due to its Turbo mode, which includes 4 air-cleaning levels to thoroughly filter all kinds of pollution indoors.
We’ve tested it in a trailer home in a small town northeast of San Francisco, CA. The trailer is set near a farm so it’s a great site to test the air purifier’s capability to reduce pollen allergy triggers. The owner of the home has problems with pollen and sometimes wildfire smoke. Sawdust due to a nearby woodworker shop is also inevitable.
The owner tried the Honeywell air purifier in his small trailer home. His child was having allergic rhinitis at that time. After about 3 hours or so (of running the air purifier), the child’s symptoms lessened even without taking antihistamines.
Further testing of the unit revealed that it could also lessen chemical smells and other foul odors. For instance, the trailer home usually smells bad due to generator fuel (because the owner likes to work outside with his power tools without the need for extensions) but with an air purifier, the gas doesn’t affect his living space that much anymore.
The trailer homeowner also liked that there’s a filter check because he often forgets many things around the house. After a few more days of testing the unit, he also praised the dimmer function, which helped his child to sleep better.
Conclusion
To wrap it up, testing the air purifiers mentioned above helped us get first-hand proof about their capabilities in cleaning the indoor air – and we hope our tests helped you in deciding as well! Remember, these are just our suggestions but it’s still up to you on choosing the best and cheapest air purifier that’s suited for your needs.
