Breathing doesn’t come easy for those of us living in many cities and towns in India. Outdoors, and as we increasingly realise, indoors too. There’s very little you can do about the outdoors (wear a face mask, perhaps) but indoors, air purifiers can do the trick. Size is key, if you’re looking at a large room size. That’ll translate into large air intake quantities, equally big filters to trap pollutants and better dispersion of clean air within a big indoor space. Purifiers for homes don’t get much larger in footprint than the Dyson Purifier Big+Quiet.
It may not tickle your sense of aesthetics at first glance (or the second; but the design slowly finds a place within your room) but as I’ve used it through a period of extreme pollution in the Delhi NCR region, I’d prefer to not part from it. Its foundations are similar to the previous generations of Dyson indoor air purifiers, complete with the 360-degree air intake. But that’s where things see a significant upgrade. The size is much larger in diameter and the clear air emerges from a vent angled towards the ceiling of the room (Dyson’s purifiers otherwise tend to have a forward clear air throw).
That vent itself is an anchor for scientific design, inspiration coming from a cone. What’s essentially called the Coanda effect, emerging clean air once it has run through the filter, reaches this vent in two different streams. At the top, they merge as they exit the tunnels, the trick here being a smooth surface (it is an enamel white finish, from what I could gather) to help speed up the air throw. This is also where the acceptably large, square shaped information display resides.
The results do speak for themselves. Compared with Dyson’s air multiplier tech, the cone dynamics are equally silent at fan speeds up to 3. Beyond that, the latter has the advantage of being less audible, one of the factors being less resistance and the lack of a tunnel design mechanism. To be fair, the Dyson Purifier Big+Quiet at fan speed 7 is comparable to fan speed 4 on its elder siblings. That’s a big win, for the tech, design and comfort. More so, because in a large indoor space such as an active living room and dining room combination, chances are this may need to work at higher fan speeds for better efficiency.
It’s a HEPA H13-grade, or high-efficiency particulate arrestance, filter has the same composition as the ones in other Dyson purifiers. But since it is much larger in diameter, there’s a lot more of the filtration layers for air to pass through – and the odds of pollutants 0.1 microns or larger getting through, are really low. As per Dyson’s confirmed numbers, there’s 21 meters of borosilicate microfibres pleated 459 times, equivalent to the area of two king-size beds and 3.8x larger than before.
That’s for the smallest and largest dust particles that may be drawn in by the outside air. Little do we realise that indoors, a large chunk of these pollutants emerges from household odors, cooking and furniture. Pets too, if you have one. That’s where the carbon filter layer becomes crucial, since its spectrum of coverage ranges from benzene to cooking gas suspended indoors. It is not difficult to know the Dyson Purifier Big+Quiet is effective. Not just because the indoor air feels fresher and cleaner as you breathe normally, but also our third-party air quality monitor illustrates it well in numbers. We used ventilation to draw in outdoor air (on one of Delhi’s worst air quality days), and once the windows were closed again, indoor readings were 465 on the AQI meter.
The Dyson Purifier Big+Quiet in auto mode reduced this number to 110 in 15 minutes and stabilised an active living room (spurts of outdoor air streaming in at intervals due to room usage) at 70 AQI through the day. For a large room space, most purifiers aren’t as effective on a sustained basis. That’s the Dyson Purifier Big+Quiet’s biggest strength.
In a way, the Dyson Purifier Big+Quiet represents a new-ish direction for the company’s air purifiers, something we’re likely to see more of with the next couple of generations and updates. Globally, Dyson also has the Purifier Big+Quiet with a specific formaldehyde pollutant removal filter, which should make its way here soon. A larger purifier which isn’t much more expensive than some of its predecessors (the Dyson Purifier Big+Quiet is priced at ₹68,990) such as the Dyson Purifier Cool TP07 and the Dyson Purifier Cool Formaldehyde TP09, is a good fit in homes with the cities with high levels of outdoor pollution.
Would it be too much to imagine a Dyson Purifier Big+Quiet with heating capabilities too, ahead of next winter? That’ll be a dream to keep large indoor rooms comfortably warm too.