Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This air purifier may be great at purifying the air, but it has some unfortunate design decisions that are deal breakers for us. In particular, its bright lights make it unsuitable for use in a bedroom when people are sleeping. We bought this model in part because it has a lights-out feature that turns off the main air quality light. The air quality light is indeed incredibly bright, so this is important. However, the feature doesn't go nearly far enough, as the smaller indicator lights on the console remain lit even when the lights-out feature is active. These indicator lights, which show the current fan speed, ionizer status, and so on, are themselves quite brilliant in an otherwise dark bedroom, bright enough to light up the room with a white, moonlight-like glow. We found that this seriously disrupted our sleep. Particularly absurd is that there is a bright white indicator light to indicate when the lights-out mode is active. That is, there is literally a bright light that comes on to indicate that you don't want a bright light. I can't imagine what the product designers were thinking here. The lights are built into the console and cannot be covered up easily. We tried taping over them, but each indicator light has extensive light bleed, so that covering up the light itself is futile; plenty of light leaks around the tape. Covering the entire console with a shirt was the only way we found to stop the light. I haven't yet mentioned that the unit beeps whenever you touch a button. So if you want to change the fan speed in the middle of the night, it will emit a happy little beep to wake your sleeping partner up and let them know about the change. If you brush against the power button by accident, the unit will, for some unfathomable reason, override your lights-out setting and reactivate the main, blindingly bright air quality light. Turn the unit on or off, and it will play a cheerful melody just to make quite certain that everyone is wide awake. These electronic sounds cannot be turned off nor reduced in volume. For all these reasons, the unit is impractical to use in a room where people are sleeping. A less disruptive flaw is that the unit is very large and bulky. We got this unit because we prefer a tower form factor over the squat boxes that are popular nowadays, but this model absolutely dwarfs other tower air purifiers we've had. It's nearly a yard tall, nearly a foot wide, and boxy in shape. It's hard to picture just how big it is from photographs. It looks like it's about to eat my old Holmes tower air purifier for breakfast. The unit works fine as an air purifier, so this might be a five-star device for someone who doesn't mind light, noise, or bulk. But for us, it was an awful choice.