Ugly But Effective & Healthy

Author's Rating:

Pros: does the job and does it well -- cleans your air!

Cons: Breeze, noise, industrial looks like having R2D2 in your living room.

Author's Review
I've got two air cleaners. With a fireplace, five cats and a dog in the house, air cleaners are a must. Especially if you're prone to sinus problems, allergies, &c. Cleaning up after the cats if practically a full time job. The hair, dander and litterbox dust all create airborne nasties. If I don't run the air cleaners on a regular basis, you can really tell the difference.

Downstairs, in the larger rooms, I have the Honeywell Enviracaire Portable HEPA Air Cleaner pictured above. Upstairs I have a smaller model which is also a Honeywell. The upstairs rooms are smaller, so I didn't need two big ones and decided to save 20 or 30 bucks.

I bought them at Home Depot over a year ago. They were having a sale, so I forget how much I paid, but I seem to recall that the two of them and four back up filter replacements were about $200.00 plus tax.

There was a larger model which was priced around $300.00. Too much for me, so I got the Honeywell Enviracaire Portable HEPA Air Cleaner after looking at the numbers on the boxes which read as follows:

99.97% HEPA filter

This was a better number than the other under-$300.00 models. I had no idea what that meant, but it was closer to 100% than the rest of my choices at Home Depot so I figured that was good. I've lived with this thing for almost two years and have only now decided to research the mystery of HEPA which is apparently an acronym for High Efficiency Particle Arrestor or High Efficiency Particulate Air(filter). That doesn't tell us much since we already knew that we're talking about an air filter. I guess it's suppoosed to take out 99.97% of the particulates in the air.


Recommended for a 17' x 22' room

Hey, that's bigger than any room I have other than my basement. Too much is better than not enough, I always say.


6 air changes per hour

That sounds good. Sounds like all the air in the room goes through the filter six times in one hour. This was pretty fast compared to the competing models (4 x per hr; 2 x per hr).

Clean air delivery rate (CADR)
for tobacco smoke: 287.

Apparently, tobacco smoke creates some of the smallest particulates the average homeowner/resident has to deal with. I guess 287 is good. I really don't know. Other models didn't even have this CADR listed.

Three air cleaning power levels.

Hey, this was straightforward enough. You can put it on Low, Medium or High. This I understood. On high it's pretty noisy. It competes with the sound of my dishwasher. It also creates a quite a breeze. In the summer the breeze is appreciated, it's like having a fan and an air cleaner in one package. On chilly days & nights the breeze isn't exactly the best thing in the world. When it's cold I use the Low and/or Medium settings.

I'm not much of a manual reader. Maybe you're not either, so I'll offer you a word of warning which may or may not have been in the manual. Do not turn on the Honeywell Enviracaire Portable HEPA Air Cleaner if you have a fire going in your fireplace. The suction this thing creates is more powerful than the fire flux and your living room will fill with smoke. It's a potential hazard and probably a good way to muck up your filter.

Here's the straight scoop on the efficacy of this thing -- acronyms and mysterious numbers aside. One sunny day I could see dense floating dust particles in the sunbeams shining through the window. The room is about 14 x 21. I turned this thing on high for about five minutes and the air was clear.

I try to leave it on for an hour or two a day; moving it from one room to another. For the most effective air cleaning it needs to be placed in the center of the room where it can create a spiraling vortex of air-sucking power.

It may be a coincidence, but I haven't had a cold since I bought these things.

A great product.