Review: Cleaner Air With the Honeywell AirGenius 5 - Wired

If you don't already know this about me, I live in the state of Florida. While known for its rampant swampland and the occasional python-eating gator, Florida is also known as a breeding ground for allergens. I'm not sure allergens breed, but my point is people who have allergies have a rough time in this state. I have no stats to support that at the moment. According to the AAAAI allergic rhinitis affects between 10% and 30% of all adults and 40% of children. Personally, in a house of five, four of us have allergies and two have asthmatic symptoms. So when Honeywell offered to send me their new air purifier to test out, the Honeywell AirGenius 5, it was a no-brainer.

The picture is deceiving; I wasn't expecting such a large box. At 30 inches tall, this isn't one of those air purifiers you just stick in the corner somewhere. In the manual, which I read (well, only the English section), it actually recommends placing at least three feet from any solid piece of matter and keeping the floor around clear. So that was step one before even plugging it in: cleaning some floor space. Then, vacuuming because it suggested doing that too. So far, without even turning it on, the purifier had already cleaned up a bit. Multiply this by every room I placed it in and the whole house was getting mystically cleaned.

The Honeywell AirGenius 5 and its statically charged ifD filter sucks in a laundry list of allergens including mold spores, pet dander, pollen, household dust, tobacco smoke and any powdered Kool-Aid that you left in a pile on the carpet. Just saying, it happens. With five settings to choose from, the purifier goes pretty much from super low and quiet to mega not-so-quiet and super high. It's advertised as being quiet, but let me tell you something about the concept of silence.

Silence is relative to the environment. In the middle of the day, with the television on and the kids running wild through the house, and around the house, then the purifier is silent as a country breeze through tall grass. However, if you have it sitting in your bedroom in the middle of the night with it set on three (out of five) then "silence" suddenly becomes akin to Chris Farley in a ninja outfit.

Compared to other products, or even a window air unit, it is quiet. Even at night, it's really not that loud. Not any more than the soft whirr of a hard drive in moderate thought. The motor is quiet overall. Again, it's all dependent on the environment. It's required that you leave the purifier on for 24 hours at a time, but I found myself switching it off at night for one major reason, which I'll get to in a second. First, how about that air quality?

The first thing I noticed after just a few minutes with the purifier in the center of the room was how crisp the air being output was. There was a definite cleanliness to it, as someone with any kind of respiratory problems would attest to. But there would be two more major tests of the power of a good air purifier before this review would be written.

The Honeywell AirGenius 5

The first would be handling the air quality around my dirty laundry. Again, any dust or pollen from the outside stuck to my clothes was rightfully sucked out of the air and destroyed by the static filter. My room is in the back of the house, the last to get fresh air so having a crisp, fresh room was certainly a treat. I even left it on overnight, ignoring the relativity of silence, to keep a fresh blast of sharp and allergen free air on myself.

The second would be handling the air quality in the boys' room, which at the time of testing had become something of that in a third world country. You see, a certain 11 year old had literally left a container of tuna behind his bed, for at least two weeks. When we finally identified the source of what we were starting to think was a dead rodent, I knew that this would be the ultimate task of the air purifier and a gallon of Febreze.

Mind you, this is an air purifier, not an air cleaner. So while it certainly sucked all the allergens and mold spores (of which there were many, as well as a growing community of maggots) out of the air, a constant stream of Febreze was needed to handle the bits of odor that couldn't be contained by any filter. Within the same day, the smell was gone and the air in their room was just as fresh as the hour preceding them moving into the room in the first place.

Honestly, this purifier is great from a clean air perspective. I noticed that I wasn't waking up stuffed up, and the air in the rooms that it stood in for a while felt crisper and not so humid. There was just one problem with the unit, and you can look at it however you want. I'm not an engineer, so perhaps I'm over reacting, but the snap, crackle, pop of the static filter can be a little disconcerting.

At first I thought it was popping when it was oscillating (it does that too, and I should mention the glowing blue touch pad display for controls is pretty darn nifty), but it appeared to be doing it at any setting and angle. So I unplugged it, waited a few minutes (as the only warning on the filter says to do) and removed the filter. Then promptly got electrocuted. Now, that struck me as odd. Why was it holding a charge after being unplugged? Perhaps something wrong with the distributor? I'm not sure; I'm not an engineer. So I asked one.

"It's broken," said my father, a mechanical and electrical engineer. Ah, so I sent that unit back. Perhaps it was just an early one off the line, either way the next unit, while still snap, crackling and popping like a bowl of Rice Krispies, didn't electrocute me when I handled the filter outside of the unit. So I wrote that off to the filter doing its business with the static electricity to attract dust.

Regardless, that crackling sound can get a little weird when the room is silent, such as night. While I don't believe internal static electricity is a fire hazard, and the unit was grounded (being on the ground) it still sounds odd to me. Some part of me expected not to hear such electrical noises outside of the machine. I should also note with the first unit, I saw lightning inside the machine. That hasn't happened with the second unit. Honeywell assured me that the first unit was most likely defective. Since the second unit is basically acting fine, that's believable.

If you are looking for a high quality air purifier, the Honeywell AirGenius 5 should end that search. Once you get over the science of how static electricity works in this situation, the air quality will be worth it. The unit currently makes its rounds through each room in the house every week, and since we've been using it no one has gotten any major respiratory problems. Of course, that could be coincidence, and while I'm not set up scientifically to actually test that theory, I don't believe in coincidence. Cleaner is better.

You can pick up the Honeywell AirGenius 5 at Target, and check Honeywell out on Facebook.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go make the 13 year-old stand behind the air purifier since the air quality coming off of him makes coal miners look clean.

Original source: https://www.wired.com/2012/07/honeywell-airgenius5/