New Dyson air purifier helps reduce indoor air pollution

Dyson Purifier Hot + Cool Formaldehyde
(Image credit: Dyson)

Suffering from itchy eyes, a scratchy throat, or a runny nose constantly, even when you’re at home with the windows shut? Indoor air pollution or the dust, dirt, and gases in the air in your home could be to blame. 

Dyson's new air purifier can detect and remove formaldehyde - the most common VOC  - along with other dust and allergens from the air, projecting purified and heated (or cooled) air back into the room to maintain a comfortable temperature. 

How you heat your home, how you cook and the cleaning product you use - and the furniture you have in your home - can all contribute to indoor air pollution, and while you may not notice any effects right now, according to the WHO, 3.8 million people every year die due to exposure to indoor air pollution. 

The Dyson Dyson Purifier Hot+Cool Formaldehyde is priced at $749.99 / £599 / AU$999 and is available now in the UK. It will go on sale in the US on May 6, and in Australia on May 27.

Clean Tech that aims to rid our lives of germs and allergens has become more popular over the past few years, and air purifiers are just one of the gadgets that fall into this category. 

While most air purifiers on the market successfully remove dust and dirt from the air, many struggle to successfully remove the gasses emitted by the products we use to clean and decorate homes. Known as VOCs (volatile organic compounds) these colorless gasses build up over time. 

Quieter and now with added voice control

The Dyson Purifier Hot + Cool Formaldehyde is also 20% quieter than previous versions and has an Auto Mode that will maintain the preferred temperature in the room. 

Alternatively, the air purifier can be manually switched on or off using the Dyson Link app for smartphones and tablets. It also offers support for Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri so you can change the temperature in the room with your voice too. 

In terms of the tech inside the new air purifier, an electro-chemical cell is the base of the formaldehyde sensor rather than a gel-based sensor, as Dyson says gel-based sensors found in competitors models can be prone to drying out over time, which it claims makes them less efficient. 

The sensor also uses an algorithm to ensure it only detects and destroys formaldehyde, ignoring other gases emitted into the air in the room from products or processes that don’t cause allergic reactions. A catalytic filter then breaks down the formaldehyde into tiny amounts of water and CO2. 

The air purifier has also been redesigned so the filters are sealed within the machine, so there’s no way for air to bypass the filters.

The information about the allergens and gasses the air purifier has caught, along with the temperature and humidity, are displayed on the built-in LCD display too, giving you a clear picture of just how clean the air in your room is. 

Evidence of a deep clean

Dyson's latest air purifier is aiming to tackle an issue that we can't see, but certainly looks to be affecting long-term health. The LCD screen that displays the levels of allergens the purifier has removed from the air, will go some way to showing homeowners that the air indoors really is cleaner. Dyson's latest cordless vacuum cleaner, the Dyson V15 Detect, counts and sizes the dust it removes from floors in the home, displaying the data on a similar LCD screen. It's clear the brand is on a mission to show consumers that they really have thoroughly cleaned their homes when using these products. 

Carrie-Ann Skinner

Carrie-Ann Skinner was formerly Homes Editor at TechRadar, and has more than two decades of experience in both online and print journalism, with 13 years of that spent covering all-things tech. Carrie specializes in smart home devices such as smart plugs and smart lights, as well as large and small appliances including vacuum cleaners, air fryers, stand mixers, and coffee machines. Carrie is now a copy editor at PWC.