Your home is now your work place, playground, meditation studio, dine-in restaurant, neighborhood bar, refuge, and movie theater. Point being, you’re spending a lot of time in it. You may as well prevent the air inside from making you sick. Indoor air is dirty. Particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, and vaporous chemicals seep in through our ventilation systems and the weatherstripping around windows. Indoor plastics, furniture, paint, and also flooring off-gas noxious fumes. An air purifier won’t do much good if you’re not vacuuming regularly and changing the filters in your home’s HVAC system, but if you live where there’s a lot of pollution or wildfires, it could help a lot.
These are our top air purifiers. We ran them, variously, in a New York City apartment, a Long Island apartment, and a Portland, Oregon, suburban home during wildfire season, in living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms. All of them provided significant anecdotal benefits, from stopping persistent coughs to helping us wake up with clearer sinuses and less raspy throats.
If you’re looking for more home tips, take a peek at all of our buying guides for more.
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Updated December 2020: We added the Coway Airmega 150, Honeywell Insight HPA5300B, Dyson Pure Hot+Cool Cryptomic, and Blueair 411 Auto.