Highly effective

Quick take: The IQAir HealthPro is the expensive king of air purifiers.

Background: I am one of those unfortunate people who suffers from serious allergies of many kinds. When tested for allergies, the nurses gathered around my arm to admire the size of the lumps growing where various tree and grass allergens had been shot into me. I have used a huge variety of air purifiers over the years. The IQAir is the best, without a doubt.

The main question anyone should ask when considering the IQAir is why should you pay 3 times the apparent "market rate" for this device.

Let me first give the technical answer. Roughly speaking, the IQAir is one of the few air purifiers on the market that is actually built in an intelligent manner. What is an air purifier? It is a very simple device: A fan blows air through a filter. The air should come in from the room, go through the filter material, and then out back into the room. Sounds simple, eh? The problem is that most air purifiers do various silly things that limit the effectiveness of the filtration. The main problem is creating a seal around the filter. This is really something that should be well understood by now, but for some reason most $100-200 air purifiers don't appear to have good seals, and this limits the effectiveness of the air purification. The IQ-Air HealthPro purifier has excellent and effective seals, and good HEPA filters.

The result is that small particles are filtered very effectively from the air. One way that I've personally compared this air purifier against a cheaper ($150) one from Bionaire is what I call the sunlight test. If sunlight is coming in through your (closed) windows, you can typically see some small particles of dust floating around (note that you need to look at air that is relatively still, so in particular it should be somewhat distant from your air purifier). Sources of dust/particles are constantly introducing new particles into the room, and the purifier tries to take these out. So after the purifier has been working constantly for several hours, one can perform this test to compare effectiveness. When I tried it, having the IQ-Air running resulted in no particles at all that I could see, while the Bionaire purifier was unable to do this - there were still several particles floating around. Of course, when no purifiers were running, the room seemed practically filled with little floating particles. So this is not to say that the Bionaire purifier was very ineffective.

All-in-all, what this means is that the IQ-Air is the clear choice for 2 categories of people: (1) People who suffer from really serious and sensitive allergies, and (2) People with lots of money who can't stand having a poorly designed device in their home. On the other hand, if your allergies aren't so serious, you should probably try a cheaper purifier first.

Some other details:

1) It is quite large: W 15" x D 16" x H 28"

2) It is fairly heavy, but still movable: 29lbs

3) It uses HEPA filters (expensive but long-lasting)
and prefilters (somewhat expensive, but long-lasting
for prefilters). Changing these is pretty easy.

4) Noise is hard to quantify, but I sleep fine with the
machine running at level 4 (out of 6 levels).

5) The IQAir Healthpro can be upgraded to the "Plus", which includes a "Gas" filter that neutralizes odors and certain chemicals. This is reviewed elsewhere.