Dyson Pure Hot+Cool Link Purifier Heater

We were fortunate enough to try out the new Dyson Pure Hot+Cool Link Purifier Heater recently, and we were really surprised by the results!

So it doesn’t have the catchiest of names, and it’s kind of weird looking. It has the word ‘cool’ in the title, but it’s not an air-conditioner. And it’s eye-wateringly expensive. But, for all of that, I think I’d still buy one.

And the number one reason is because I don’t believe our home (our yours for that matter) is entirely ‘safe’. Our home is warm, clean and dry. But I do believe the air particles, micro-organisms and gases in our home are constantly depleting our health and wellbeing.

Over the long term this can lead to a whole host of disease, such as asthma, allergies, auto-immune disease, early ageing affects and perhaps even dementia.

Dyson will probably cringe at my comparison here, but I see the Dyson Purifier as like a mini-HRV system. And on that basis, the cost becomes more palatable (just!).

Now the big difference is that an HRV system brings filtered air from the outside in, and then circulates it around the home. The Dyson, on the other hand, filters the air already in your home, and then circulates that around your home.

So we really want to know the air is being filtered. And that’s where the very clever little app comes in. More on that in a moment.

This is what Dyson have to say about their product:

Whether you’re at home or out and about, when on, this intelligent machine automatically detects airborne pollutants and purifies the air as well as monitors the air to heat to your preferred temperature

And about the air monitoring function, Dyson have this to say:

Users can track their air quality with the Dyson Link app which provides reporting on both indoor and outdoor air quality, based on a location of your choice. The app shows if your air quality is poor to good, and now showcases easy to visualise humidity and temperature graphs too.

So let’s try and cover off most of the above in this review, and give you an idea if this is the real deal, or a good bit of clever marketing to health-conscious parents!

Out of the box

Out of the box, this fan is pretty cool. It does look a little weird to me (but I guess so would an old school fan if you were seeing one for the first time). Once you plug it in and crank it up though, it makes more sense.

The unit’s filtration system is in the base, where air is sucked in and filtered. It’s then forced up an out the grooves at the top of the hoop part. There’s no blades inside there spinning around, which makes this super-safe around kids.

The bottom of the unit also tilts forward and back, and oscillates side to side, to circulate air around the room. The fan also has a direct stream, or a diffused stream option. So you can heat up just one part, or the whole of a room.

All of this can be controlled via the app, which is really cool (I did catch myself once walking upstairs and pointing my phone at the unit, like a remote, to change the fan speed, before thinking ‘what a ninny’). So you can definitely use the fan while ‘out and about’. And it does have a fully automatic function to set and forget too, but where’s the fun in that.

Heating function

I should mention 2 important points here. The fan is amazingly quiet. I was really impressed with just how quiet it is. Until, that is, you have it cranked right up to fan speed 10. At the higher fan speeds, it’s noticeably noisey.

It’s not loud like an obnoxious heatpump or anything like that. But you can definitely hear it running in the background:

https://youtu.be/d483rVAiRjw

Apparently there is a night function, where you can filter the air, and heat, on quiet. But I didn’t have a chance to check that out.

The second point is that the Dyson Pure Hot+Cool Link Purifier Heater is a heater… it’s not an air conditioning unit.

I’m not quite sure what I was expecting here. Your average fan doesn’t ‘cool’ a room either does it? We reached out to Dyson directly to get their take on this:

The Dyson Pure Hot+Cool Link purifier fan heater doesn’t have air conditioning functionality however the airflow creates a cooling effect relative to the temperature of the room it’s in – much like wind has a cooling effect on a sunny day. Air Multiplier technology creates a powerful stream of uninterrupted airflow that sweeps the room.

That said, the heater function works great. It gets a large space up to heat really quickly, and then sets this as the ambient temperature, keeping it at the same heat.

Probably a third caveat at this point is that it sounds like it uses a lot of power. In our 2 week test, we didn’t run it enough to see any noticeable difference. But some people have commented online that it is power-hungry. But most electric fan heaters are.

Air filtration

In terms of the filtration ability. We sort of have to take Dyson’s word for this. But the science is really sound.

99.95% of air particles are filtered through 6 metres of HEPA microfibre that’s been pleated 200 times. This is industrial grade HEPA technology for your home. So this is definitely going to filter out particulates in your house that can cause asthma, allergies, hay fever and other adverse health effects.

Gases in the air are filtered through a dense layer of graphite crystals, and then a layer of tris-impregnated graphite.

There’s a whole bunch of VOCs in the air of your home that you want to get rid of. Benzene from paint, glue and detergents. Toluene from petrol and exhaust emissions. Acetaldehyde from cooking. And formaldehyde, which is released from MDF particle board, and other building products (found in about 90% of New Zealand homes).

All of these gases are carcinogenic at some level. Probably not the levels found in your home. But the science now is around what are the effects of micro-exposure to these gases over a whole lifetime. There are numerous articles now, for instance, looking at the link between formaldehyde and dementia.

I’m less sure about the science around using graphite to remove gases from the air. But as Dyson apparently spends 7 million pounds a week on research and development, I’m guessing they know what they’re talking about.

Test results

So we were a bit surprised by the results of our test. The rooms we thought were bad, apparently were good. And places we assumed were OK, were not good.

We set the air quality to the highest setting. And 2 rooms came up as ‘fair’ in the app.

The living room was the first ‘fair’ room. Once we thought it through, we realised we’ve only just finished working on our kid’s study nook project. As we’ve been doing a heap of painting in this space, that might account for the air quality. Our house is open-plan living/kitchen too. So the same space will have cooking residue as well as all the dust and debris we bring into the room every day.

It was a definitely a concern that the second room was our kid’s room though! This is definitely a room we’d assumed had good air quality:

You can see from the image above that the Dyson system takes into account where we live, and what the temperature, humidity and air quality of our region is. It uses this in it’s algorithm to work out the room air quality. That’s some next level engineering!

So we ran the fan in this space on and off for a few days. And the next time I remembered to check out the app, we had a green ‘good’ result in that space:

As you can see in the test result image above, the Dyson unit has been busily cleaning the air in this space for a week. And the average air quality is now good.

Anything to improve?

The Dyson purifier heater is cutting a new road in home air filtration. There are a few other products on the market in this space now. But this is definitely very new technology.

I think Dyson are definitely headed in the right direction with this product though. The bladeless fan is very safe, the heater works very well, and the filtration seems to be very effective.

Probably my only real criticism would be around the app.

There’s definitely a learning curve to using the app. It’s really not that intuitive. And I felt like I didn’t know what everything should do, or what most things were telling me.

I want the app to slowly step me though the process the first time, explaining every aspect of the software to me, like I was a new-born child. This is so I understand what it’s all about. I want to be hand-held Dyson! I don’t want to have to look up the manual, or google the answer!

I got very confused when moving the product around the home, and having to reset each room we put it in. This process wasn’t clear at all. I feel like you should calibrate each room of your home first. Then the app should show all the rooms of your home on a dashboard, and the air quality of each room. That way you could move the unit to where it can do the most work. If definitely doesn’t work like that.

I felt like the app was written by engineers, for engineers, with some cutesy graphic design laid over the top to feel more friendly!

Dyson have gotten product design down to a fine art. But if they want to get serious about adding software and tech to their consumer products, they really need to invest in user design too.

Conclusion

This is a fantastic product. If you’re at all concerned about the air quality in your home, or you have people living in your home with asthma, or allergies, you should consider this.

The product is very expensive. It currently retails in New Zealand for $999. The filters also need replacing each year at around $100 a pop. And it will churn through a fair bit of electricity. But if you think of this as an investment, then that might justify the price for you.

You’ll also need to be prepared to spend a bit of time understanding the product, and especially how the app works. But, again, this is new technology, so as long as you can look past this, you should be really happy with the product overall.