With the poor air quality becoming a common feature in most cities in India, it is all about damage limitation as far as your health is concerned. At least inside your homes, for the few hours that you spend indoors every day, you can negate the deadly cocktail of outdoor air pollution and the indoor pollutants such as cooking gas residue, for example.

Swedish company Blueair, well known for their high-end and high quality indoor air purifiers, have launched some more affordable devices in India. The Blue Pure 211, from what we have experienced, is completely redefining the price category.

View Full Image With the Blue Pure 211, Blueair has just set new benchmarks in terms of performance.

Design: A breath of fresh air

What immediately stands out with the Blue Pure 211 is the clever design—where the entire top part is the fan, while the entire bottom section is a replaceable filter. The biggest benefit of this 360-degree filter design is that it is able to run more quantity of air through the filter at the same time, than what the standard single or dual input vent design purifiers can manage. The clean air emerges from the top.

We saw a very similar design in the Xiaomi Mi Air Purifier 2 (Rs9,999), but the Blue Pure 211 is bigger in size. The entire filter base is wrapped by what is known as a pre-filter—this is a fabric that catches the larger particles, can be washed or vacuum cleaned, and prevents the main filters from getting choked. This fabric is available in multiple colour options, including blue, grey and yellow, which could allow you to match it with the room’s décor or simply select one based on your personal preference.

The only drawback of this design is perhaps the fact that with the air intake so close to the floor, it may start acting as a vacuum cleaner and pull in the dust from the floor, if that is a problem in your home. This will clog up the fabric pre-filter much quicker than usual, and that dust will be visible being stuck to the fabric. The trick is to keep the purifier slightly higher, on top of something, to prevent this from happening.

If dust is still enveloping the pre-filter quicker than you would have imagined, the trick is to take the fabric off the rest of the filter section, and wash it carefully, and allow it to dry completely, before re-installing it.

In the Blue Pure 211, you get a dial on the front—touch it once to switch it on, touch it again to increase fan speed, touch it again for max fan speed and touch it again to turn it off—how cool is that?

View Full Image Blueair claims that the Blue Pure 211 can clean room sizes as big as 50 sq. meters.

Performance: When you have power, it shows

Blueair claims that the Blue Pure 211 can clean room sizes as big as 50 sq. meters, which would ideally be a very large living room or hall. This means you can consider this as something which could become a part of your living room, for example. This purifier has a rated 590 cubic metres per hour (cu.m/h) Clean Air Delivery Rate (CADR), which is significantly higher than anything we have come across in this price range so far. And the excellent performance shows. In a large hall, it improved the air quality from a very unhealthy 241g/m3 to as low as 34g/m3 in just 30 minutes. It is also able to maintain the clean air quality quite well, even if there is activity in the room.

Even at the highest fan speed, this massive size fan does not become loud enough to bother you at all. In fact, it is just whirring away in one part of the room, and does not interfere with people chatting amongst themselves, watching TV or even speaking on the phone. Some purifiers, at max fan speed settings, get really loud. Some of this has to do with the design of the air exit vent’s grille, which dampens any noise before it emerges.

Verdict: Redefining the purpose

With the Blue Pure 211, Blueair has just set new benchmarks in terms of performance. In terms of the features, Blueair has stripped away what was perhaps not entirely essential, such as the ability to control it using a mobile app (the Blueair Sense+, for example), and kept it strictly functional and easy to use. The high quality filters remain, and that is the critical advantage. At that price, no purifier comes even close, irrespective of brand and claims of performance by the rival. And the charismatic personality is just an added bonus.

Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter.

Share Via