Best air purifiers for 2020

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In any given night of sleep, most of us take between six and nine thousand breaths. With each of those breaths, we inhale countless particles, ranging from harmless dust to potentially harmful pollutants. For the immunocompromised or the just plain risk averse, there is an obvious solution: the home air purifier. For a couple hundred bucks, you can make sure the air in your house is as fresh as the sheets you just laundered.

There are an overwhelming number of air-cleaning devices on the market, all advertising various filtration methods. How do you find the best one?

Before getting into the details of which devices are best and why, it’s important to understand the basic mechanisms that these products use to clean your air. To get a handle on these methods, I talked to Dr. Richard Shaughnessy, the Director of Indoor Air Research at the University of Tulsa.

According to Shaughnessy, most air cleaners run your air through a filter designed to catch particles you might otherwise inhale. These are usually High Efficiency Particulate Absorbing filters and they’re designed to capture 99.97% of particles sized .3 microns or larger. HEPA filters reliably remove smoke (including from wildfires), pollen, dust and other particulate that pollutes home environments.

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